Dante’s Sacred Poem: Flesh and the Centrality of the Eucharist to the Divine Comedy 9781441129642, 9781472593849, 9781441157478

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
1 The Immutable Feast of Dante’s Comedy: Introduction
Notes
2 The Eucharist to the Time of Dante
From the Jewish table to the early medieval tabernacle
“All Eat of Him, yet Each One Eats Him Whole”
Wonder and dissent: The long twelfth century
The thirteenth century and the bodies of Christ
Notes
3 Flesh Corruptible: Dante’s Inferno
Tre, triune, Trinity: A numerological preamble
The holy midway
The monstrously mutable, nonevacuable body
Flesh and blood—and guts
Fathers, sons—and the missing Holy Spirit
The food of full-grown men
Notes
4 Betwixt and Between: Dante’s Purgatory
The reorientation toward Church and Christ
The cross at the altar
Preparing for the bread of angels
Notes
5 Bread of Angels: Dante’s Paradise
Bread from heaven
Three and two and one
The consummate canto
Spiritual seeing and the elevation of the Host
Notes
6 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Dante’s Sacred Poem

Also Available from Bloomsbury Dante and the Sense of Transgression William Franke Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse Samantha Zacher

Dante’s Sacred Poem Flesh and the Centrality of the Eucharist to the Divine Comedy Sheila J. Nayar

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Sheila J. Nayar, 2014 Sheila J. Nayar has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-2964-2 PB: 978-1-4742-7576-7 ePDF: 978-1-4411-5747-8 ePub: 978-1-4411-3083-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain

For the bread of God is that which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life to the world. —John 6:33

Contents Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Immutable Feast of Dante’s Comedy: Introduction The Eucharist to the Time of Dante Flesh Corruptible: Dante’s Inferno Betwixt and Between: Dante’s Purgatory Bread of Angels: Dante’s Paradise Conclusion

Bibliography Index

viii 1 17 47 95 137 205 213 229

Preface I begin with a mystery—one of the lower case-m, historical sort. This mystery involves Raphael’s frescoes in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican. One of these, School of Athens (1510), in which the greatest minds of the classical world crowd a virtual agora, is extremely well known and is considered by many to mark, if not the pinnacle of Italian Renaissance art, certainly Raphael’s masterwork. Its partner fresco, which faces it—and which School of Athens presumably heralds—is ironically much lesser known. This is The Triumph of the Holy Sacrament1—and by “heralds,” I mean that the sixteenth-century visitor walking through the room was expected to be encountering “the age-old progress of the human spirit” (Verdon, “Disputation”), which moved from the Greco-Roman paganism reflected in School of Athens toward The Triumph of the Holy Sacrament’s depiction of the eternity of Christ. Raphael’s Triumph, more particularly, is “a kind of pictorial Summa Theologiae,” one depicting the Trinity (Collins xvii). Moving from the canvas’ top (heaven) to its bottom (earth), we are presented with the Father, God, directly beneath whom appears Christ surrounded by saints of both the Old and New Testaments (xvii). Below Christ appears a gold-encircled Dove, representative of the Holy Spirit, which descends toward an altar flanked by historical persons. On that altar appears a gilt monstrance, which is to say, a vessel exhibiting the Host, that small, white, consecrated wafer which is believed by Roman Catholics to be Christ’s flesh. In this way, Raphael’s scene shows both the Church Triumphant, the heavenly church “with Christ in glory,” as well as “the Church on earth which focuses on Christ’s presence in the Eucharist” (xvii). That “small round of white” that Raphael isolates at the altar’s center is considered no less today to be the key to the mysteries of the Catholic faith (Verdon, “Disputation”). But in Raphael’s painting, it is not so much Eucharistic adoration (which is an entirely religious act) that our humanist visitor is beholding; no, the roughly two dozen men gathered around the altar are instead “a dynamic ‘school’ of thinkers … who are intent upon penetrating the meaning of the mystery” just as animatedly as their pagan predecessors are searching for truth in their Athenian school.

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What are those thinkers flanking the altar debating? Transubstantiation— quite literally a thing’s change of substance, in this case of wheaten bread into Christ’s flesh. It is Christ’s sacramental offering of his body as the Eucharist, in other words, which these representatives of theology are discussing. Among them are several popes (Julius ii, Sixtus iv), several saints (Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose)—and Dante Alighieri. Yes, Dante—to the right of the altar, his garb red, his features stern and angular, and his head crowned with the laurel wreath he never received in life from his beloved Florence but which symbolizes here his eminence as a writer (Verdon, “Disputation”). But what is Dante doing here? Why would he be included among Church representatives debating transubstantiation? (He is the sole layman in the group.) Perhaps because he was a pundit-poet and connoisseur of the arts? Perhaps because he was a native of Florence, where Raphael himself spent time? Or, perhaps this painting reveals Raphael’s—and the Renaissance’s—esteem for Dante as a theologian. Although we today may not consider Dante to be a theologian in the technical sense, this painting surely foregrounds Dante’s union with the Church—with he “turned in loving contemplation,” as a Catholic might say, “toward the supreme manifestations of the Father’s love for the world: His Son, His gift of the Spirit, His Word and Sacrament” (Collins xvii).2 No one would dispute that the Trinity—again, God as three divine persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit)—is paramount to Dante’s Comedy. But is that sufficient to explain Dante’s presence in this fresco, given the highly abstract nature of the Trinity’s representation in his poem? And what of the relative absence in the Comedy of the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ? Jorge Luis Borges, in fact, once observed that Jesus was altogether absent from Dante’s poem: “There is a character missing … one who could not be there because he had become too human. That character is Jesus” (qtd. in Hawkins, Dante 172). But Christ in his profound humanity is there, I shall argue. He is there in, and as—and there and simultaneously not there as—the Real Presence, the term used to express Christ’s really being in the bread and the wine once they are consecrated. The Eucharist, in other words, is “really He,” as Jesuit John A. Hardon emphasizes, “the real Jesus” (“Eucharist and Christ’s”). In spite of the daunting, centuries-long tradition of analysis and commentary on Dante’s Comedy, there has not been a single work that examines transubstantiation across his epic poem, whether as Eucharistic imagery (both distorted and delightful); as Host-related metaphors, allusions, and tropes; or as something utterly and theologically vital to the purpose and structuring of the Pilgrim’s journey. And so, the following book, which will hopefully remedy that oversight. While Charles Singleton may argue that

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what sustains the structure of the Comedy is the story of Exodus, the Jews’ journeying from bondage in Egypt to the promised land (Mazzotta 5), I shall argue that the Eucharist, as conceptualized through the early fourteenth century, is no less metaphorically central to structuring of Dante’s poem—both reflecting, and also mystically veiling, that greatest of all Catholic mysteries. While what follows by no means attempts to propagate a religious tradition, we cannot adequately comprehend Dante’s time, I would suggest—and, ergo, his vision—without acknowledging the profound impact that theology and faith had on both. (For similar reason—which is to say out of respect for Roman Catholic tradition and belief—more often than not, I capitalize terms that Catholics themselves capitalize to denote transubstantiation (e.g., Eucharist and Host instead of eucharist and host).) Indeed, could our lifting of this particular veil—for certainly there are many in the Comedy—suggest some non-egoistic justification for Dante’s waxing within its pages that his is a “poema sacro/al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra”—a “sacred poem to which both heaven and earth have set their hand” (Par. xxv.1–2, trans. Sinclair)? Then again, how to reconcile that claim with the coarse and polyvalently profane texture of his Inferno? At least one-third of the Comedy has us partaking not in penitential pilgrimage, let alone basking in celestial effulgence; instead, we are mired in the shit and slime and stink of Hell. Perhaps it is more appropriate, then, to widen the paradigmatic theme of this book to flesh, for doing so gives us license not only to speak of the Eucharist as “really He,” but of flesh no less human than divine: glorified but also punished; spiritually adored but also cannibalistically eaten—with the earthly flesh (human, corruptible, penitent) leading ultimately to the Flesh (divine, incorruptible, an immutable feast). Indeed, this flesh motif threads through the entirety of the Comedy. The anthropophagous resonances that undergird the Ugolino episode of the Inferno make way for the Corpus Christi-like procession pivotal to Purgatory, which itself leads, with elegant calculation, to the poem’s final vision. And this vision, I shall argue, embodies the Eucharist, analogically exemplifying the “Bread of Life” (to borrow Christ’s description of himself in the Gospel of John). That Second Person of the Trinity is not absent from the Comedy, once more; rather, he is, in the form of a veiled allegory, sacramentally pivotal to the poem. There is nothing transubstantiated about a scholarly work of this sort, of course. A book like this derives not from instantaneous conversion, alas, but from hard work and discipline, compounded by a modicum of good luck. And since neither effort nor fortune comes without the inspiration and pivotal

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influence of others, I would like to thank those persons who were instrumental to this project’s origin and development. I thank, as I must always thank—though, frankly, there is never enough thanks in order suitably to thank—my husband, Thomas W. Shields, who has not only acted patiently as a sounding board but has also willingly accompanied me to virtually every northern Italian town where Dante spent time in exile. In fact, every book I have singly written has, in effect, been researched by two. The same sort of incalculable thanks must go to my parents, Baldev Raj Nayar and Nancy Ann Nayar, who have generously—and always animatedly—taken interest in their children’s intellectual endeavors. Unlike much of my previous work, this book owes an especially special thanks to my mother, whose personal immersion in Catholicism has irrefutably benefited this project. My interactions with her have also dissuaded me from insensitively treating this book’s theme as something exclusively medieval or bygone. Perhaps now she will forgive me for my having once, long ago, while vacationing in northern Quebec, placed cheese curds between two unconsecrated hosts and, with wily teenage humor-cum-defiance, pronounced my handiwork “Grilled Jeez.” Then again, even that incident has bearing on this project, as the sardonic aversion I was showing was not unfamiliar, as we shall see, to thirteenth-century responses to transubstantiation. A similar inspirational gratitude is owed to R. Howard Bloch and the members—Holly Crocker, especially—of the 2003 NEH seminar on the Old French Fabliaux at Yale University. It was they who first sparked my interest in medieval literature, though I could have hardly guessed that an essay I had written while there, on inverted Eucharistic symbolism in the scatological tales of the fabliaux, would eventually lead to a commentary on Dante’s Comedy; and so, I owe much to those medievalists who first introduced me to their historical period. I have similarly benefited from teaching at a small college, where one can readily interact in intellectually energizing ways with experts across the disciplines. My frequent conversations with religion scholar W. Barnes Tatum have helped me to think outside the literary-analysis box. Then there are the usual suspects closer to my departmental home: my current colleagues Jillian Haeseler, Charles Hebert, Wayne Johns, and Kathy Keating, as well as several former ones, George Cheatham, Judy Cheatham, and Jessica Labbé. Thanks, too, to several academic neighbors, who fed my Dantean cravings: Janet Gaddy, Jane Girardi, Jim Langer, Paul Leslie—and to Paul Soukup, at Santa Clara University, who has shepherded me graciously and humanistically into the world of heady theological thought. For their expertise at locating rare and often aging tomes,

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I thank Rachel Wahesh and Christine Whittington; and for her administrative aptitude, I am indebted to Cathy Jansen. David Avital, at Bloomsbury, has been with this project from the beginning, and for his diligence in seeing it through, I am more than appreciative. That appreciation extends, too, to those blind peer-reviewers who reviewed the original prospectus. For their insights and support, I am not only thankful but, given the oft territorial, turf-warring nature of academia, truly heartened, even honored. I must also acknowledge standing on the shoulders of several giant translators of the Comedy—John Ciardi, Mark Musa, and John D. Sinclair. For the sake of tonal consistency and ease of reading, I make primary use of Musa’s translation, though occasionally I will also revert, with citation acknowledgment, to Ciardi’s or Sinclair’s. It is through these translators’ accomplished renditions of the Comedy that I first entered Dante’s world and, for that, I thank them. Finally—and most fundamentally—I must offer a hearty grazie mille to those members of the Greensboro College honors class of 2014 who participated in the honors course Word & World II, as well as to Dan Malotky, with whom I co-taught that course. It was in preparing to teach Dante’s Inferno for that class that this particular Eucharistic motif revealed itself to me. Yes, I am fully aware how overly mystical that sounds, perhaps even puerile; but I can get no closer to describing an experience when suddenly you see something so certainly, so clearly, that, for an instant, its size and responsibility terrify you. Of course, after the initial terror comes the joy of research and discovery—and, admittedly, of ownership—but foremost for me was the utter delight I experienced in engaging with something altogether new and wondrously old. More importantly, can there be anything as lovely (and as hoped-for) as having a book idea emerge as the consequence of (hopefully) passing on to the latest generation of undergraduates the joy of critically engaging with literature? And, so, I dedicate this book to those honors students who, in the spring of 2011, willingly and wondrously toiled through Hell.

Notes 1 Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari would later erroneously title the fresco The Dispute of the Eucharist (Gaudoin-Parker xx), a title which has stuck. 2 Purgatory was also under discussion by this ecumenical council, and arguably could have had some bearing on Dante’s presence here. Still, the focus seems so clearly on the non-Purgatory-related celebration of the Real Presence.

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The Immutable Feast of Dante’s Comedy: Introduction

In his Dante: A Brief History, Peter Hawkins tells the story of a student who once imparted “his dismay over what he called the ‘surprising absence’ of Christ from the Divine Comedy” (107). Yes, the poem “offered a panoramic Christian vision,” and, yes, this student saw how Paradise “moved the pilgrim from one saintly encounter to another” (107); but surely some kind of encounter with the Savior would materialize. And yet, none came (107). Even earlier than that, we find Karl Vossler, in 1929, carping that both God and Christ “are all but wholly banished” from the Comedy: They do not appear, have no influence, do not act, do not speak. The poet traverses Their eternal realms without being able to acquire any personal relation with Them; perhaps, somewhat as a curious traveller examines a magnificent royal palace, coming in contact only with servants and court officials, while His Majesty may at most be admired through a half-open door and from afar. (73–74)

Dorothy Sayers once referred to Christ’s presence as “fleeting” (190), and early twentieth-century Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce challenged the poetic worth of the poem’s last canto, contending that Dante had relinquished poetry in favor of ratiocinated abstraction (Freccero, Dante 247). Even the extent of Dante’s own religious feeling has been called into question, based on Christ’s putative truancy from the poem. But is it conceivable that Christ is not as absent from Dante’s Comedy as earlier critics have surmised? Perhaps the veiled presence of Christ is not only real but also pervasive—and of a sort that would make that presence Real, which is to say as something both there but not seen; as active but only by those who believe. Here, I am speaking of the consecrated host, the Eucharist, the Real Presence, which is at the heart of Roman Catholic celebration. Much as Jesuit John A. Hardon pithily declared in 1982, “No Real Presence, no Mass; no Real

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Presence, no Communion”; and, in order to appreciate that presence’s value to spiritual life, Hardon contends, we must return in spirit to St. John’s gospel, when Christ solemnly avowed, “I am the Bread of Life” (“Eucharist”). That, in short, is what this book does vis-à-vis the Comedy: it engages in a more sacramental reading of the poem’s innumerable allusions to flesh and bread, in order to foreground the significance of the Eucharist to the poem. Particular attention is paid to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the elements of bread and wine become, through priestly consecration, the actual body and blood of Christ. Transubstantiation as an article of faith was still fairly recent in Dante’s time, certainly new enough, as we shall see, to have continued to provoke tensions and anxieties (sometimes catechumenal, other times heretical) regarding the oral receiving, chewing and ingesting of Christ’s actual flesh. And this, I shall argue—this doctrine, this belief—is fundamental to the structure and texture of Dante’s Comedy, thematically reverberating through Hell as well as Purgatory, clear into the final vision in Paradise xxxiii. Indeed, Dante’s Beatific Vision of the Eternal Light is, on one particular plane, the Eucharist itself—a representation of that “Sacred Banquet,” as an ancient prayer intones, “in which Christ is received, the memory of His Passion renewed, the mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given” (qtd. in Pierre). In this way, I shall follow Hawkins, who insightfully advises that rather than drawing attention to Christ’s absence from the Comedy, we do better “to speak of his refracted presence within it,” to see the poem “as an extended journey into the mystery of the Incarnation, with each of three canticles offering an encounter with the Word-made-flesh that accords with its particular mode of vision and poetic representation: the parodic, the symbolic, and the unmediated” (Dante 110). But if this is really such a vital way of reading the poem and a key to disinterring “the meaning that is hidden beneath the veil that covers [Dante’s] strange verses” (Inf. ix.62–63), why has it not been read this way before? Perhaps part of the answer lies in the very nature of the Comedy. Because it is so rich and densely populated; because Dante literally pours into his tripartite tour all manner of civic and political and religious (and courtly and vulgar and classical and personal) themes, characters, and styles; and because its allegorical and polyvalent potentials additionally thwart any single meaning or reading; because virtually “everything is in it” (to borrow from a much later Italian artist, film director Federico Fellini1); and because 700 years of ways of reading the Comedy have themselves evolved and adhered to any reading of his already-multifaceted—and, hence, protean—poem: perhaps that is why. Or, as Sayers ably puts it, “Dante’s Divine Comedy comes to us now enriched not

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only with all those events and associations of the past out of which the poet fashioned his image, but also with the accreted events and associations of the six hundred years of his future and our past which lie between us and him” (184). Indeed, it might be worth our digressing briefly here in order to consider the hermeneutical history of the poem. As Michael Caesar notes,2 the early commentators, including the author of the fourteenth-century Epistle to Cangrande (more on that shortly), as well as the poem’s earliest readers, essentially agreed that the Comedy’s interests were chiefly doctrinal and moral (7). Ironically, those sorts of readings—not to mention, the incarnational theology so obvious to Dante (Collins 41) and the scholastic philosophy that had dominated thirteenth-century intellectual life—soon found themselves challenged by novel interests (Petrarch’s among them) in classical literary texts (Caesar 9). As a result, the relations between the spheres of poetry and theology, which Dante had striven all his life to keep united, became increasingly strained until each ultimately asserted control only in its respective territory (9). 3 And so (admittedly presented here with somewhat crude and simplified linearity), religiously-read Dante gave way to unread Dante—due to the poem’s linguistic impurity—or to erotically-read Dante, which led next to politically and socially read Dante. Soon, Protestants would foreground pope-censuring Dante, which would lead yet again to a non-reading of Dante, this time by hostile, Dante-censuring Counter-Reformationists (36). And so, by 1616, Bellisario Bulgarini was able to pronounce that the Comedy’s plot “had very little that was Christian about it” (qtd. in Caesar 37). Where Dante was being read shifted, as well, with his audience progressively narrowing to scholars in universities (Caesar 27). During the more hedonistically poetic years of the early seventeenth century, Dante would be largely perceived—though perhaps not in Florence—as “barren and dull” and “simply too old” (37). Nevertheless, by that century’s close, Dante was increasingly difficult for any academic survey of European literature to flout, such that a certain compromise had to be reached: the Comedy as a whole would be rejected, with select passages or poetic features grudgingly acknowledged (41). Eighteenth-century judgments would only confirm that the Comedy was “hard, obscure, difficult to get into, impossible to follow, and barbarously written; or alternatively (or concomitantly) … it [was] disorganized, irregular, careless of decency and decorum, and … mix[ed] improperly different genres, different styles, different kinds of discourse (poetry, science, philosophy)” (43). Those episodes deemed significant, primarily from the Inferno—e.g., Ugolino’s possible

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devouring of his children; Francesca and Paolo’s literary devouring of a chivalric romance—emphasized Dante’s capacity to “move” readers; and this set in motion his eventual posthumous vocation as a poet of imagination and feeling, which of course led to his popularity among the Romantics (45–46). Only in the late 1800s would there be a “massive ‘rehabilitation’ of Dante” (43), thanks in part to a burgeoning historical approach to literature. “[L]iterary-biographical questions” were now generated, as was Dante’s depiction “as an ‘early’ author in the modern, national, tradition” (44). (Note how far we have treaded from Dante’s Christian roots, both in terms of his person and his poetry.) Dante had now been “placed firmly among the originating geniuses of modern European culture,” and this was a position from which he would “not henceforth be dislodged” (49). As dedication to Dante studies increased, so too did it begin to fragment, with alternate lines of inquiry being chased. As a result, Dante could be projected in some circles as “a religious reformer foretelling the Reformation or as a patriot reaching forward to the future unification and independence of Italy,” while in others he might be “an agglomeration of the two” (56). Still other circles dissected the Comedy for the purpose of reconstructing a (putatively objective) biography of Dante (59). And so, to borrow Hawkins’ helpful précis, over the centuries Dante “has been variously ‘constructed’—as lover, statesman, neo-Platonist, proto-Protestant, Romantic visionary, Byronic hero, PreRaphaelite, father of his country, theologian in verse, precursor of the modern novel, and, finally, altissimo poeta, the consummate poet” (Dante xxv). The more history-centered approach carried into the twentieth century, resulting not only in the ideological sorts of readings fashionable in the postmodern period but also in the recovery of biblical and medieval readings of Dante’s poem (Collins 42). Sometimes these exegeses led to proclamations that gained wide scholarly currency—such as Erich Auerbach’s declaration that, because of the moral disposition of Dante’s language and his valuation of political life, Dante was the first true “poet of the secular world” (qtd. in Mazzotta 5). Additionally, a growing sensitivity to Dante’s cardinal technique of allegory emerged (Collins 112).4 That technique had, of course, been the traditional method employed by many renowned medieval scholars and also by Church Fathers interpreting the Scriptures; and, as James J. Collins argues in Dante: Layman, Prophet, Mystic, Dante not only accepted that method, he presented it “as the key to understanding his own greatest work” (112). Indeed, the allegorical technique has been proclaimed “one of the most original aspects of Dante’s work,” notwithstanding that it often eludes readers of the Comedy today (112).

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This contemporary homing-in on the poem’s allegorical dimensions has ironically led to a legion of interpretations, however, some of which, as Ernest Fortin observes, are fairly inventive, oftentimes reflecting the slippery slope of allegoresis more than elucidating Dante’s text (159). Beatrice, Dante’s guide through most of Paradise, has, as one example, “been made to stand for any number of strange and often incompatible realities: baptism, the minor orders, the monastic tonsure, the priestly vocation, the ideal woman, the bishop of Florence, the agent intellect, reason illuminated by faith, the light of glory, the essence of Christian theology, and the list goes on and on” (159). The question thus unavoidably arises: will this book’s particular Eucharistic focus be merely adding another pitiably ingenious interpretation of the Comedy to the voluminous critical library that already exists? Hopefully its historical grounding in, and heedfulness about, the Christian culture of the time, as well as its reading across the entire poem allegorically (rather than detaching discrete passages from the whole), will mitigate that possibility. Indeed, I would go so far as to propose that to extricate Dante too dramatically from the medieval Christianity of his time is, while perhaps humanistically valuable, likely to encourage misreadings of his chief intentions. This is nothing new to contemporary Dantists. That “medieval life was overwhelmingly dominated by the Christian religion and the Church” has been stated hundreds of times (Barnes 231). Even the medieval conception of time, as Jacques Le Goff advises, was conceptually religious and clerical (231). Moreover, Dante’s lay education, or perhaps his education in minor orders (biographers are not certain), was deeply shaped—and this is fairly agreed upon by scholars—by Franciscan theology and spirituality (Collins 24). Dante, in fact, explicitly mentions in his writings having “attended lectures in the ‘schools of the religious’” (24).5 Even if Dante’s Comedy were not unambiguously religious and ecclesiastical in its dimensions, and even if Dante had not immersed himself in study of the theologians as he did, we ought not to be surprised by the Comedy’s theological core, given how pervasive the presence of the Roman Catholic Church was in everyday life in late thirteenth-century Florence (Barnes 231). But of course Dante’s epic poem is a work with unambiguous religious and ecclesiastical dimensions. (Recall that his earliest commentators considered him first and foremost “Theologus Dantes” (qtd. in Caesar 107–108).) As a result—and given what constituted the centrality of medieval faith—no one, as H. Flanders Dunbar shrewdly warns, “should venture into the symbolism of the Divina Commedia unfamiliar with some of the symbolism of the Mass,” for the Mass was both “ubiquitous and omnipresent” and hence largely forged

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the Middle Ages’ atmosphere; to drive home this point, Dunbar rhetorically reprises that there “was no educative factor in the life of the Middle Ages” more powerful than the religious ceremony of Communion (402). The cultural history—indeed, the anthropology—of how the bread and wine that Christ offered his apostles evolved into a transubstantiated wheaten wafer is indisputably complex, fascinating, and, as regards the Comedy, entirely relevant. Chapter 2 provides an account of that process, up to, and especially vis-à-vis, the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Only through exposure to the rich backdrop of theological and philosophical disquisitions regarding what the consecrated host was—not to mention, when and how precisely it became Christ’s body—can we really understand how the Host’s presence (indeed, its omnipresence) in Dante’s poem might be real. Such disquisitions did not occur in cultural isolation, of course, and so, we must attend additionally to the historical events, circumstances, and heresies of the day, as these were often responsible for spurring greater articulation and anatomization of that holiest of sacraments. Let it be said, for now, that Dante would have shared with the churchmen of his historical age a belief in the miracle of transubstantiation. By this I mean that, at the priest’s utterance of the words of consecration—Hoc est corpus meum; hoc est sanguinis meum (This is my body; this is my blood)—the substance of the bread and wine would become “the reality of the Person of Christ,” even though they appeared to be same (Dunbar 319). For contemporary non-Catholics, religious or otherwise, my emphasis on this process—on this moment—may appear overplayed. But, as Chapter 2 will demonstrate, one cannot adequately stress the import of this ritual, this rite—this corporeal intimacy with Christ—up to, and within, Dante’s time. Perhaps it is most effectually driven home by the opening line to Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture: “At the centre of the whole religious system of the later Middle Ages lay a ritual which turned bread into flesh—a fragile, small, wheaten disk into God. This was the eucharist: host, ritual, God among mortals” (1). As I indicated earlier, acceptance of this ritual by Catholic communicants did not happen overnight. It took centuries for the changing of the elements of bread and wine into flesh and blood to be theologically explicated (and, even then, it was not until the mid-sixteenth century’s Council of Trent that transubstantiation would officially be defined). Moreover, that fragile flour-and-water disk was also highly entangled in the politics of its time. Integral to any discussion of the Host’s prominence in the religious system of the Middle Ages are the so-called heretics who rejected the notion of ingesting Christ’s body. Just as fundamental, however, is the initial anxiousness of Catholic believers, whose horror at the

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thought of literally ingesting Christ spawned countless Eucharistic miracles, not to mention a debatably displaced preoccupation with the Host’s desecration by heretics, Jews, apostates, and so forth. The debates, and perhaps especially the lived Christianity that sometimes incited those debates, make an understanding of the Eucharist’s history essential, once more, to comprehending the structural force and dynamism of Dante’s Trinity-echoing tripartite poem. Chapter 3 will begin the book’s major project: a close reading of the Comedy apropos transubstantiation. Particularly, this chapter will canvass the Inferno’s rich imagery which not only subverts the virtuous elements of both the Incarnation and transubstantiation but also potentially works off those aforementioned anxieties regarding ingesting Christ’s flesh: the horror of halfhuman figures (men merging with animals); tensions of fathers against sons; eating and ingesting motifs that are monstrous rather than representative of the Real Presence. It is common wisdom that, as the Inferno progresses, the depictions of cannibalism intensify and grow more hideous, vilely echoing pangs of hunger rather than of satiation; but this is an intentional counterpart or reversal to the satiation, I shall argue, that the Host will bring. That vileness culminates, after all, with the Pilgrim’s encounter in Inf. xxxiii with Ugolino, who recounts the tale of his children’s sacrificial offer of their own bodies for him to eat. There is hardly a more startlingly “literal” inversion of the Son giving up his divine body for the sake of the Father—dwarfed only, perhaps, by the three-headed, body-munching reversal of the Trinity that is Lucifer. The eating metaphors so prominent in this canticle are best understood when seen in light of their symbolic bearing on the Eucharist-resonant divine encounter that the Pilgrim will experience in Paradise. In order to make that connection transparent, I will highlight some of the Eucharistic miracles that arose in thirteenth-century Italy, as well as in Europe more broadly, as these speak no less to the wonder of transubstantiation than to the fears (often attributed to the idiotae, the ignorant) regarding literally what eating Christ’s flesh meant. As a prelude to this, I will briefly discuss what Ciardi has aptly noted, which is that, notwithstanding Dante’s genius for details, Comedy’s brilliance is ultimately structural, with “everything relat[ing] to everything else” (66). Indeed, this is corroborated by—and likewise corroborates—my assertion that there is a symphonic build-up, an increasingly sacramental progression moving us from unredeemable flesh to Holy Flesh. If there are no accidents in correspondence between the three parts of the Comedy, as Ciardi maintains, if such parallels are in fact “essential parts of the poem’s total structure” (300), then how could Dante’s dark, distressing, and powerful allusions to flesh-eating in Inferno xxxiii

8

Dante’s Sacred Poem

not be foreshadowing, even transpositionally prefiguring, a supreme revelation of Christ in Paradise—as Host and transubstantiated presence, as the Living Flesh who forewent his human flesh at age xxxiii? Before we make the celestial ascent to Paradise, however, we must, like Dante, climb Mount Purgatory. And so, Chapter 4 shepherds the reader through Purgatory, unpacking that canticle’s cantos for their sacramental imagery—including those of baptism and confession. If the whole of Purgatory is indeed built upon the structure of the Mass (Ciardi 365), can we not infer with reasonable safety that this Mass is leading toward the culmination and ultimate purpose of the Mass, which is the receipt of the consecrated host? (Recall Hardon’s succinct avowal, “No Real Presence, no Mass.”) No wonder, then, that here the “Three Persons in One Substance” (Purg. iii.36) becomes evermore focalized, with allusions to food and explicit references to appetites swelling like a growing refrain. Here, also, we find the motif of flesh, only unlike the ugly, cannibalistic shadings given to it in the Inferno, in this intermediate zone flesh becomes increasingly aligned with the flesh of Christ as recounted in the Gospel of John. In order to clarify how that gospel inflects Dante’s poem, I offer in this chapter an interpretation of John—with its emphatic focus on Christ as the “bread of life,” as the “bread which has come down from heaven.” Most compelling for many readers of Purgatory are its final cantos, in which Dante witnesses a glorious parade. This parade has been likened by a number of scholars to the Corpus Christi procession or, at the least, to some early rendition of that ritualized procession of the Host. I shall for certain make use of these scholars’ persuasively presented claims, positing all the while that what Dante is providing is a direct, and indeed devotionally charged, preparation for witnessing in Paradise that most holy of sights: the living bread, the Word made Flesh. By the thirteenth century, the perception that faith and reason could be compatible had become more accepted (Whalen 10). Still, belief in transubstantiation could never depend entirely on reason. Reason can arguably lead to a better explication of the process and envisionment of that theological premise, but one’s encounter with the Real Presence, one’s recognition of the Eucharist as a fulfillment of Christ’s words in John 6:56—“My flesh is meat indeed … ”—can only be fulfilled or “completed” through faith. Thomas Aquinas, who produced the most comprehensive dissertation on transubstantiation, cites this very utterance in Contra Gentiles (253). For this reason, Chapter 5, which explores Paradise in light of the Eucharist, will appraise Dante’s draw on Thomas’ writings, including the liturgy Thomas is believed to have penned for celebration

Introduction

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of the Corpus Christi feast. Also of concern will be the tensions induced by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, when transubstantiation became official Church doctrine. These tensions help to elucidate—not to mention, historically confirm—the pertinence of the Eucharistic theme to Dante’s time. Surely it is not mere accident that early in Paradise we find references to the “bread of angels” and to the classical Greek Glaucus, who found his fish not only revived but himself turned into a god through eating an herb. And the Eucharistic valences do not stop there: we shall encounter references to one’s feeding on the Lamb of God, and to accidents and substance (concepts which consumed theologians wrestling with the conversion of bread into Christ’s body) and to the flesh-eating Pelican that is a symbol for Christ. While numerous scholars take the referenced “bread of angels” in Dante’s opus to be a metaphor for knowledge, the present project recommends that perhaps, like many other tropes in his Comedy, that metaphor needs also to be understood as something more literal. Many a delivered exemplum in the Paradise—about reason versus faith, about Christ’s presence—takes on a doubly rich resonance when assimilated in light of the transubstantiation theme. Indeed, when the poem is read on the basis of this major structuring device, Christ becomes its very epicenter. For readers who remain skeptical still about the Eucharistic presence in—and as—that final vision of God, intriguing resemblances will be brought to the fore between the Comedy’s Eucharistic tropes and those to be found in other medieval texts, such as the twelfth-century’s St. Patrick’s Purgatory, of which Dante is believed to have had first-hand knowledge. Here, I will also discuss at greater length the paired concepts of substance (sustanze) and accident (accidenti) whose presence in the Comedy’s final canto, I must insist, is not simply a case of Dante paying homage to Aristotle. As earlier I mentioned, they play a seminal role in Thomas’ scholastic grappling with the Divine Flesh. A brief concluding chapter will revisit some of the book’s key points, funneling them through present-day attitudes to the Eucharist, in anticipation of bringing this reading of the Comedy “into the twenty-first century.” So, are we to gather from all this that Dante was—or that he even had to be—deeply religious? That is a question I can neither answer, nor am particularly inclined even conjecturally to address. Suffice it to say that, while Dante was keen and sometimes even vitriolic when it came to condemning clerical corruption in the Church (the Comedy is smattered with many such instances), his aim was not—as it was for many of the reformer-“heretics” of the time—to destroy any distinction between the laity and clergy (Collins 159). Dante had little sympathy for the reformers’ heterodoxy, as his writings often

10

Dante’s Sacred Poem

demonstrate, and he remained publicly orthodox “in his defense of the ordained priesthood and the unique charisms entrusted to the legitimate authorities in the Church” (159). More important, perhaps, is that the mystery of the Incarnation was central to Dante’s interpretation of the Bible, as, again, a variety of his writings show—and this is notwithstanding the philosophical crisis he supposedly endured sometime before writing the Comedy (112). And then there is the subject of the Trinity, which for Dante, says T.K. Seung, was “the ultimate principle of all things … the ultimate ground of the universe” (“Metaphysics” 217). Whether or not the invented cosmos of the Comedy was born of Dante’s deep religious conviction is less salient here than is the poem’s adherence to both Catholic symbolism and Eucharistic doctrine (a marvelously paradoxical combination, given that the Eucharist is not a symbol, doctrinally speaking). The latter would have provided a compelling and—for those who could unveil it—a startlingly intelligible and emotively charged allegorical framework, one brilliantly reflecting the spirituality of its time. For readers who suspect I am exaggerating the importance of the “Bread of Life” to Dante’s time, consider this: In 1272, when Dante was in his youth, Florence was put under an interdict by Pope Gregory x. What this meant was, outside the administering of the viaticum (which went to the dying), Florentines were strictly forbidden from all liturgical rites and sacraments (Collins 7). As Collins muses, this must have cast a “somber pall” over a city so accustomed “to enjoy[ing] its festive celebrations of baptisms, marriages and processions honoring the Blessed Sacrament and the saints” (7). But depriving people of the “‘Bread of Life’ was the ultimate weapon wielded by these unscrupulous popes determined to force people to obey their political and economic policies” (7). Even if one was not a fierce or even fully orthodox believer, in other words, to be denied sacramental and liturgical rites was essentially to be denied the very structural and ceremonial makings of Florentine society—not to mention the Eucharist, that “central act of worship for Roman Catholics” (Whalen vii). One might propose this papal prohibition was thus tantamount to an existential ostracism of Florentines. A number of scholars admittedly assert that Dante gives meager attention to the sacraments in his poem: Vincent Truijen, in his entry on “Sacramento” in the 1970s Enciclopedia Dantesca, “noted that there was no evidence of Dante having reflected on the sacraments in the Commedia”—something Truijen himself found surprising, given that this made Dante an anomaly, medievally speaking (Treherne, “Ekphrasis” 183). Perhaps the author most unconvinced of sacramental allusion in the Comedy is Peter Armour. He, too, acknowledges

Introduction

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expecting some allusion to that “most conspicuous and regular of all the Sacraments”—in his case, apropos a particular episode in Purgatory; and yet, he determines, the Eucharist is nowhere mentioned nor used as a symbol, nor is the crucial mystery of Transubstantiation investigated. Indeed, for Dante the Eucharistic phrase, the “bread of angels,” has a different meaning; it is wisdom, the food of man’s mind on earth, and the wisdom of God the Son which feeds the angels in heaven. The symbol of wisdom as bread and the doctrine of Christ as Wisdom incarnate cause the brief sacramental reference to be absorbed into, and superseded by, a much more extended and elevated scheme of thought and imagery. (Door 4)

So, Dante’s imagery may possess sacramental overtones, Armour concedes, but it is always part and parcel of “a much wider and more allusive context” (5).6 Then again, even if Dante’s use of the panis angelorum is non-sacramental, as Matthew Treherne worthily counters, any image of the Bread of Angels unavoidably “reintroduces a Christological, and indeed Eucharistic, element to [Dante’s] conception both of knowledge of God, and of the individual human’s fitness to attain that knowledge” (“Ekphrasis” 196). Treherne’s position, as we shall see, finds support when one enters the Comedy mindful of that particular tropological veil that I believe Dante is asking us to lift. Although I have made many a reference to allegory, to tropes, and to that complex symbolic veil behind which Dante places a literal transformation, note that I have not ceded to the fourfold interpretation commonly employed by medieval theologians, and which Dante is purported to have used in constructing his Comedy. Of course, this only matters if one believes that it was Dante who penned the Letter to Cangrande outlining how the Comedy was to be interpreted on these levels: (i) literal; (ii) allegorical; (iii) moral; and (iv) anagogical. Poets, unlike theologians, were typically limited to two levels, the literal and the allegorical; but Dante—or whoever was writing as Dante in that missive—claimed more specifically that the meaning of the Comedy was “polysemous,” that is, having several meanings; for the first meaning is that which is conveyed by the letter, and the next is that which is conveyed by what the letter signifies; the former of which we call literal, while the latter is called allegorical, or mystical … . And although these mystical meanings are called by various names, they may one and all in a general sense be termed allegorical, inasmuch as they are different (diversi) from the literal or historical; for the word

12

Dante’s Sacred Poem “allegory” is so called from the Greek allcon, which in Latin is alienum (strange) or diversum (different). (qtd. in Anderson 334)

In some sense, it would be convenient for me to accept this theological method of interpretation vis-à-vis Dante’s Comedy and to be disposed toward believing in the authenticity of the entire letter to Cangrande. After all, its Dante (whether him literally or his Dantesque doppelganger) explicitly refers to the work’s overarching allegorical meaning as that of “our redemption through Christ” (qtd. in Collins 202). Such a statement “indicates clearly the underlying Christ-centered meaning of the whole Comedy,” as Collins observes (202). William Anderson, from whose English translation of the Latin letter I borrowed, sees justification in this method. (In fact, somewhat comically for us, he provides a bread-related fourfold interpretation of the Comedy, describing it as “a sandwich with a bottom layer of daily bread [the literal level of the fictional story] and a top level of the bread of angels [the anagogical level of ultimate truth], filled with the allegoric and the moral meanings” (Anderson 335).) Now that I have given the fourfold method its explanatory due, I prefer, like many previous commentators—especially those of the fourteenth century—“to stick to the simpler interpretations” (331) and to discuss the Comedy’s allegorical and polysemic dimensions in—to use Dante’s own words—“a general sense.”7 Still, it is important to note that polysemy was not only written into texts like Dante’s or interpretively employed by theologians to their readings of Scripture. There had also been a longstanding tendency to ascribe a multitude of meanings to the various Christ-centered rituals of the Church. Consider, for example, the profusion of meaning already appended by the end of the second century to the words of institution, when Christ’s words at the Last Supper are repeated over the bread and wine: “It was the proclamation of the Lord ‘until he comes’; it was a sharing in his body and blood; it was a sacrifice, the re-creation of Christ’s sacrifice, which inaugurated a new covenant between God and man” (Bokenkotter 28–29). It was especially during the Middle Ages that the “transcendental, awesome, and mysterious nature of the Mass was allowed to blot out almost completely the original spirit of [the original celebration’s] community participation,” with mystical and allegorical significance thereby becoming evermore attached to the service (131). With the various actions of the priest no longer clear or intelligible, the Mass increasingly became “a kind of pageant representing the life, death, and sufferings of Christ”; and so, the priest who fell into silent prayer after reading from the gospel

Introduction

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signified Christ praying in the garden of Gethsemane. When he stretched out his arms, he represented Christ suffering on the cross. Five times he made the sign of the cross over the chalice and host in order to signify the five wounds. When he knelt it was to signify Christ’s death, and when he stood up again, it was to signify his resurrection. (131)

Conceivably, we ought to read Dante’s Comedy in a similar vein, which is to say as both a more literal and a more allegorical “doing of theology.” In an age when poetry was evaluatively held in low regard—at least by theologians— Dante was able imaginatively to represent Catholic theology (Collins 61). And in order for him to embody theology completely, fully, and vigorously, he most certainly would have been inspired, if not quite obligated, to engage with what lay at the heart of Christian worship. Surely, too, when cast through the lens of this extended metaphor of transubstantiation, Dante’s conviction that he was, in Grayson’s words, “fulfilling a divine mission, having been chosen like Aeneas and St. Paul to reveal to men a special vision of God’s justice” (“Dante’s” 161) appears less bombastic—even less obscene. But to return to a question earlier posed: How could something so architecturally—or, shall we say, anatomically—central to Dante’s masterwork have gone undisclosed in English-language scholarship for so long? On the other hand, had no one previously witnessed Eucharistic symbolism in Dante’s poem, I probably would have abstained from pursuing this project, as doing so would have seemed too strangely detached from seven centuries of commentary. But there have indeed been scholars who have ardently pondered the Eucharistic resonances in the Comedy. Nevertheless, this handful of scholars—and there really are only a few—have tended to concentrate on discrete images or incidences, such as in terms of one particular canto in the Inferno, say, or as undergirding Purgatory’s Corpus Christi-like procession. In other words, while partially glimpsing the Eucharistic allegory, they have never investigated it paradigmatically across the entirety of Dante’s poem. Still, great due must be given to commentators like Francesco da Buti, who, in pre-modern times, recognized the seven sacraments in the banners between the Griffin’s wings in Purgatory (Little 1–2). Closer to our era, Luigi Bennessuti, in the nineteenth century, briefly alluded to the Comedy as the Pilgrim’s journey toward his receipt of Easter communion—which culminated, Bennessuti said, in a Eucharistic reception at the end of Paradise (2).8 Bennessuti did not discern, however—or, at least, did not construe in any concrete or particularized fashion—the intentionally perverted Eucharistic imagery that inflects the Ugolino episode in Inferno or the Pilgrim’s encounter with those

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Dante’s Sacred Poem

three circles of light in Paradise.9 Hence, I will be pulling primarily from more recent, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship, as such works, although fragmentary in their assessments, help to endorse a more latitudinal Eucharistic reading of Dante’s poem. These include Lizette Andrews Fisher’s The Mystic Vision in the Grail Legend and in the Divine Comedy, published in 1919, which offers, in Stephen Little’s concession, “the most in-depth analysis of the historical context of the Eucharistic presence in the Comedy” (2)—even if Fisher limits her scope to Purgatory exclusively, and, even more particularly, to the procession to Eden, which she likens to a Corpus Christi parade. (Later, Dorothy Sayers and Charles Singleton would do the same in their work.) I shall also, following Little, make use of William O’Brien, who examines Corpus Christi-related references in Paradise ii. So, too, will I enact borrowing privileges from Judson Boyce Allen, who suggests that the “stack of icons” that appear in Paradiso xiv and carry through to the poem’s end function as a single picture—of “a chalice, with an elevated host above” (72). Although his interests lie primarily with the iconography of the chalice, one cannot dismiss his momentary spotlight here of the Host. Additionally, a number of commentators have located “corrupted” Host imagery in the Inferno, including John Freccero, William Cook, and Ronald Herzman. Indeed, Cook and Herzman, in their cowritten essay “Inferno XXXIII: The Past and the Present in Dante’s Imagery of Betrayal,” perhaps veer closest to the cannibalistic/sacramental tropology that links Dante’s three realms of the afterlife—though the authors constrict their scope to the Inferno alone. But as they skillfully observe, the vexing questions of cannibalism that Inferno xxxiii raises “can only be fully understood when the reader draws on contemporary history and social theory, classical literature, and biblical figuralism, strands that are woven together by Dante into a seamless whole” (377). Nevertheless—and as I have now repeated perhaps one too many times—this “larger pattern” does not come to a halt with Satan; instead, it seamlessly weaves through Dante’s climb toward the earthly Eden, and his ensuing, increasingly lambent flight toward God. Mathew Treherne is another of the more recent scholars to identify Eucharistic metaphors in Dante’s opus. Particularly, Treherne detects “striking parallels” between the Eucharist and Dante’s descriptions of the carvings on the Terrace of Pride in Purgatory x–xi (“Ekphrasis” 183). Meanwhile, Nicola Fosca, whose recent Italian commentary on the Comedy recognizes allusions in Purgatory to the Corpus Christi feast, argues against those critics who tendentiously downplay Eucharistic imagery in Dante’s poem (Little 4–5). For that same reason, I will also draw fairly copiously both on Mary Alexandra

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Watt’s work, which demonstrates how Dante’s Comedy is structured like a meta-textual church; on James J. Collins’, with its sensitively religious approach; and on Stephen Little’s, which discourses on the “sacramental poetics” of Dante’s work. These scholars’ words and verdicts—and those of many other theologians, historians, biographers and Dantists, besides—reticulate through the pages that follow, serving as the filaments (sometimes contiguously connected, sometimes interlaced) that help to illustrate the manner in which the Eucharist unifies Dante’s tripartite poem, bringing us associatively from various states of turpitude to a sacred encounter with the triune God. In this way, these authors will also, as an unintentional collective, assist me in troubling, if not quite dismantling, any belief that “most conspicuous and regular of all the Sacraments, the Eucharist, which links Christ to man and heaven to earth” (Armour, Door 4), is nowhere to be found in the Comedy. In fact, it is arguably in its deference to the (appropriately enshrouded) mystery of transubstantiation that the Comedy becomes “a kind of medieval summa—the last great encyclopedia of the Middle Ages” (Grayson 162). If Dante’s Comedy is indeed “an expression of the mystery behind the equation of the Logos with God and of the life of God with light,” as Anderson waxes (69–70), it also expresses, borrowing directly from John’s gospel, the salvation that comes through that mysterious “bread of God” (6:33, emphasis added).

Notes 1 This statement is made by the character of Guido in Fellini’s self-reflexive film 8½. Guido, a director, is here describing his own film. 2 The ensuing history is taken primarily from Caesar’s excellent chapter on the critical heritage of Dante studies. I hope the reader can forgive me for borrowing so liberally from that source. 3 As Caesar observes, when it comes to the Comedy, even Dante’s son, Pietro Alighieri, “insists on seeing it as a poetic fiction (fictio) and interpreting its author as a classic, on a par with the poets of antiquity, and according to the same criteria” (134). 4 Collins cites Erich Auerbach, Charles Singleton, and Robert Hollander in this regard (112). 5 There were four studia in Florence where he may have studied, as these were all open to laymen: the Franciscans’ at Santa Croce, the “Dominicans’ at Santa Maria Novella, the Augustinians’ at Santo Spirito and the Carmelites’ on the other side of the Arno” (Collins 24–25).

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Dante’s Sacred Poem

6 Armour cites as the fundamental reason for the absence of the Mass and the Sacraments in the Comedy “the perfectly orthodox one that the Sacraments, traditionally defined as outward signs of inward grace, pertain solely to man’s life on earth. They are impossible in hell, unnecessary in Paradise … . [T]he sacraments have no more place in Purgatory than they do in hell or Paradise. St. Thomas says unequivocally: ‘The Sacraments do not remain in the afterlife’” (Door 7–8). I shall have more to say about this later. 7 Bruno Nardi is perhaps the critic who most vociferously argues against Dante employing the fourfold method—and hence authoring the letter to Cangrande— because of the presumptuousness that would have been inherent in Dante’s doing so (Anderson 331). 8 In Bennessuti’s words, “E come in Virgilio queste nozze non si raccontano, ma si lasciano supporre avvenute subito dopo la vittoria sul suo nemico Turno, così è in Dante, che lascia supporre le nozze dell’anima con Dio nella Comunione Pasquale entro il tempo santo che ancor correva (giovedì dopo Pasqua, ossia l’ottava della istituzione della Eucaristia) dopo la vittoria su tutti i suoi nemici spirituali, ossia sulle sue passioni.” 9 Although I have studied his commentary—especially vis-à-vis the thirty-third canto of each canticle—my knowledge of Italian is limited, and so, I can only ask for the reader’s indulgence if I have overstated the case.

2

The Eucharist to the Time of Dante

There are scholars today who argue that sacramental thinking is altogether alien to modern secularism’s modes of conceiving time, space, matter and language, and that, to some degree, such thinking had to be dismantled in order for modernism to be born (Schwartz 11). As Regina Mara Schwartz wittily characterizes of these sublunary skeptics: “God’s body cannot be here and at the right hand of the Father,” said a logical of physical space that trumped the space of sacramentality. “Man cannot eat God,” said a logic of human physiology that, turning a deaf ear to the liturgy of sacramentality, went so far as to equate the claim of participation in the divine with cannibalism … . “A sign can only stand for, that is, stand in for what it signifies, which is necessarily absent” said a logic of representation that defied the participation of the sign referent. (11)

But all this is naught to today’s Roman Catholic. Belief in the bread and wine as really being, after consecration, the Body and Blood of Christ is an—if, not the—essential article of faith for Catholics worldwide (Groeschel and Monti 55). Open many a catechismal book today and you will find a statement like “The greatest treasure in the Catholic Church is, without question, the Holy Eucharist—in which Jesus Christ humbly assumes the appearance of bread” (Cruz xi); and even more specifically vis-à-vis the particulars of that humble transfiguration: at the moment of the Consecration of the Mass, the bread and wine on the altar truly become the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. The bread and wine cease to exist, though the appearances and properties, or accidents, of bread and wine remain. This momentous change is known as transubstantiation—change of substance. (xiii)

The momentousness of this change is most succinctly reflected, perhaps, in Joan Carroll Cruz’s statement that “[t]he consecrated Host and the Precious Blood

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Dante’s Sacred Poem

under the form of wine are given the adoration that is reserved for God alone, since they are, indeed, Almighty God Himself” (xiii, emphases added). But it was neither an easy nor a casual journey for the Eucharistia, or thanksgiving, to move through the Middle Ages’ more scholastically pedantic times and into the form of ecclesiastically writ doctrine. (In earlier times, the Eucharist had been more inconclusively considered “in some sense the body and blood of Christ” and “in some sense a sacrifice” (Stone, History 22).) In order to comprehend this sacramental thinking, its vitality and, indeed, its intellectual and spiritual ascendency in the time of Dante, we need to immerse ourselves in his habitus. If medieval culture really does form “a kind of echo-chamber, within which the sound of the Commedia must be allowed to reverberate” (Botterill 19), then we need to explore what the Eucharist could have possibly meant when theologically parsed, when pontifically celebrated and popularly embraced, not to mention when horrifically ingested or heretically spurned. But let us work our way up to those latter unorthodoxies (which, by the by, indisputably played a role in transubstantiation becoming doctrine in 1215).

From the Jewish table to the early medieval tabernacle It is Jewish table customs that shed light on the Eucharist’s origins. As Raymond Moloney reminds his Catholic readers, “Our Lord did not begin from nothing”: Christ took familiar Jewish rituals of grace and celebrated them in a novel way by “relating them to himself and to his death” (10). For the external form of worship he turned to the familiar rituals of grace before and after meals. Most famous were his words while offering bread to his apostles: “This is my body”; and, thereafter, wine: “This is my blood.” But were Christ’s words to be taken literally? Christ had commanded his disciples to reenact their communal meal in his memory; and, indeed, they did so after his death, calling their liturgy a Eucharistia, or thanksgiving, during which they recited prayers in imitation of Christ and shared bread and wine as a meal (Mazza 20). Only with time would the separate rituals of prayer and communal eating merge into a single “complex sign of Christ’s death and resurrection” (Moloney 10–11) and the original ekklesia, the believers themselves, be trumped by the bread as the body of Christ (Foley 21). Conceivably, this explains the relatively few (and by modern accounts, somewhat squishy) allusions to the Eucharist in Christian writings up to the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, when the co-eternality of Father

The Eucharist to the Time of Dante

19

and Son was finally explicitly settled (Stone, History 55). We find the Eucharist described as “a spiritual gift,” for instance—sans any specificities regarding its nature1—and also as a “figure (figura) of His body”2 (22–33). What we do not find is any spokesman of the early Church “subscrib[ing] to a mere symbolic interpretation of the rite” (Bokenkotter 43). While in the earliest of Christian catechisms, the Didache,3 there is “lack of any mention of the Lord’s words of Eucharistic Institution,” (7), later theology and Church teachings would come to recognize “the Lord’s words of Eucharistic Institution … as among the necessary elements for a true or valid Eucharistic celebration” (O’Connor 7). The real controversies began in theological attempts to deduce the crucial moment when actual consecration occurred: Was it with Christ’s words? Did that mean it happened separately and at different times for the bread and wine?4 And into which of Christ’s body was it consecrated, into the crucified or the resurrected?5 Such concerns come rather later than the Nicene period (Stone, History 41), when the mysterious status of the elements which had contented earlier theologians became entangled with the complex, and sometimes convoluted, scholastic dedication to ratiocination. It was in Ambrose’s and Augustine’s writings before the Scholastic period that both the teachings and controversies which were to mark the Eucharist’s history in the West6 first appeared in embryonic form (Moloney 102). Ambrose (c. 337–397), in effect, initiated the doctrine of consecration, claiming that Christ’s explanatory words (“This is my body”; “This is my blood”) stimulated “the bread and wine's transformation into the Body and Blood of Christ” (Mazza 154).7 (Ambrose may also have been the first to refer to the entire ritual as the “Mass” (O’Connor 37).) It is in the works of his pupil, Augustine (354–430), however, that we find initial attempts at a definition of a sacrament: It is a “sacred sign”; and, elsewhere, “signs, when they pertain to divine things, are called Sacraments” (qtd. in Rogers 25). Or, as Augustine more evocatively illustrates in another context, “Take away the word, and what is water but water? Add the word to the element, and there results a sacrament” (25–26). Although for Augustine a sacrament “referred to the visible element in a holy action or activity or gesture” (O’Connor 53)—wherein “one thing is seen” and another “understood” (qtd. in Stone, History 94)8—he was quite emphatic about the outward reverence or adoration that a Christian ought to offer the Eucharist before receiving it (Groeschel and Monti 180). He was equally emphatic that the identification of the bread with Christ’s body was so complete that even wicked recipients received and, indeed, were Christ’s body—were “made into the Lord’s loaf of bread,” as he averred in a homily (qtd. in Mazza 155).9 The key point,

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however, when it comes to Augustine is that, in the words of Moloney, “the sign cannot be adequately distinguished from the reality but participates ‘in some way’ in that which is symbolized” (105). Some theologians during this patristic period (c. 100–500) were “so struck by the extraordinary nature of the Eucharistic Change” that they sought out strange, new terms by which to describe it (Moloney 101). They spoke of a “‘transelementation’ of the bread and wine,”10 of a “transrhythmization” (101) and of a “transfigurantur”—which, as Ambrose wrote, “means that a thing ceases to be what it was and becomes what it was not” (qtd. in O’Connor 40).11 The primacy given to the epiclesis, to the calling down from high that results in the consecration, further underscores the importance of the Eucharist during this period (Moloney 98). Perhaps that is why, by the fifth century—no doubt aided by Constantine’s edict in 313 protecting Catholics from religious persecution and his general promotion of building basilicas—the celebrants’ initially simple rooms were supplanted by large and spacious buildings (Bokenkotter 42). Now, instead of being consecrated on a simple table, the Host was placed “on a massive and ornate altar made of precious marbles and studded with gems” (42); and the Church, which had previously designated the faithful, now meant the edifice in which that altar appeared (Foley 49). (Host, incidentally, derives from the Latin word for “victim” [hostia], since, in the Mass, “Jesus offers Himself to God the Father” as propitiation for Catholics’ sins [Cruz xxi].) Although all parties accepted that the Eucharist was Christ—at least based on a letter attributed to Pope Gelasius i (d. 496)—the Eucharist was also described as still being bread, indicating that any notion of total change in the elements “was not yet so fixed in Christian thought” (O’Connor 73).

“All Eat of Him, yet Each One Eats Him Whole”12 The ninth century is said to mark a “watershed” in the history of Catholic liturgy, what with its increasing clericalism and conjoint emphasis on the sacredness of the communion rite (Moloney 118). It also marks the nascent exclusion of receiving the Host by hand, as well as a withdrawal of the chalice from the laity (118). In this sense, the period pays unhappy tribute to the increasing alienation of those once-pivotal celebrants from the Eucharistia. Now, they were spectators and kept at bay from clerical proceedings by way of a hefty railing (Bokenkotter 130). Further, the language in which the Mass was said, Latin, was no longer a lingua franca, thus forcing the laity into even greater retreat from formal participation. Nevertheless, the increasingly fervent

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conviction “that God became truly present on the altar” made the experience transformative even for the most “unlettered worshipper” (Dyer). As Joseph Dyer lushly describes, The richly decorated vestments, the comings and goings of the ministers and servers at the altar, the processions, the mystery of a sacred ritual language, the chanting and the silence, the glow of candles, and the fragrance of frequent censings created an encounter with the divine which powerfully united clergy and laity.13

Such performance was no doubt amplified by a growing fear, even fetishization, regarding the handling of Christ’s blood and flesh. By this time, unleavened bread in the shape of a coin had become the sacramental norm (Bokenkotter 118), and the intactness of these wafers was essential to ensuring a paucity of crumbs—of fallen specks of Christ’s sacred body (Foley 85). No wonder, then, that the unconsecrated wafers were now prepared with exhaustive care by bathed and combed monks, who picked out the wheat grains and tenderly washed them, “careful that neither their saliva nor their breath came into contact with the Hosts” (Snoek 40). Even the vessels—which, much like the wafers, had become “more precious” than the celebrants—began to be consecrated. Not only that: at the same time, those celebrants were being progressively restricted from receiving the Host (Foley 86). And what of the attitudes of the theologians to the Eucharistia? While the patristic writers had been generally attentive to the Host as actualizing and renewing redemption (Moloney 115), by the ninth century, a new literalism surfaced, with the sacramentally synthetic figura of the past losing its theological grounding, if not its appeal (115). Thus, for the first time, the Eucharist became a matter of considerable controversy (115). One individual, in particular, fathered the thorny theological reflection that would riddle theology for centuries to come: Paschasius Radbertus (O’Connor 85). Radbertus (785–865), a French monk, authored the first theological treatise on the miraculously converted elements in the Eucharist, De corpore et sanguine Domini (Of the Body and Blood of the Lord). There he asserted, in Enrico Mazza’s pithy summation, “that the Body of Christ which is present in the Eucharist is the very body born of Mary”; and that what is “present in the Eucharist is the physical flesh of Christ, which is as it were ‘veiled’ by the appearance of bread and wine, so that believers will not feel horrified at eating it” (183–184). Radbertus openly marveled at those who, in his own words, “want to say that in the Sacrament there is not in fact the reality of the flesh and blood of Christ … a figure not a reality, a shadow not a body” (qtd. in Stone, History 220). Radbertus’ association

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of truth (veritas) with concrete reality thereby led to his reputedly “simplistic identification of the historical body of Christ with the eucharistic body of Christ” (Kilmartin 84). As for how this transformation could occur without any change in appearance of the bread or wine, “[Radbertus] replied—as would many in the eleventh century—that nothing was impossible to God, and that nature itself was nothing except the will of God” (Radding and Newton 4). Another monk, Ratramnus (d. c. 870) countered Radbertus, parrying that the bread and wine did not become Christ’s blood “in truth” but only “in figure” (qtd. in O’Connor 93): “For the bread is not substantially [substantialiter] Christ, nor is the vine Christ, nor are apostles the branches” (qtd. in Radding and Newton 4–5).14 Disputations like these were confined to a very few participants, to be sure, and that is likely why they ended without need for public condemnation, since nothing had been officially declared heterodox (Mazza 186–187). The same would not be the case for the eleventh century, however. Given the growing linguistic unintelligibility of the Mass, with its “phalanx of intervening ministers” and “architectural barriers” affirming the laity’s ignobility, is it any wonder that the visual elements of the liturgical celebration became an increasing focal point (Foley 92). Denied access to the celebration’s heart (for now the priest murmured his prayers to himself in Latin), worshipers sought spiritual nourishment in comparatively marginal and peripheral elements of the celebration. These their imagination clothed “with edifying and moralizing meanings,” indeed with “allegorical” readings that soon inaugurated a new literary genre: the Expositiones Missae or Explanations of the Mass (Cabié 71). No doubt, this played a part in what would eventually become the visual— and devotional—high point of the Mass: the elevation of the Host, that is, the lifting of the Host at the moment of consecration so as to render it visible to the congregants (Grant 228). In fact, for a good portion of celebrants, an “ocular communion” now substituted for an actual, individual receiving of the Host (Foley 92). A growing preoccupation with seeing and visually adoring the Host transformed even church architecture, with houses of worship now “constructed to function as large stone monstrances,” as massive holy vessels for the Eucharist (Foley 92). Before examining the magnitude of that ritual moment, however, let us take account of the theological battles that helped to fuel its veritable fetishization. At the heart of this battle was Berengar of Tours, whose long life (c. 1000–1088) was blighted by “no less than two solemn condemnations by the Church” (Moloney 118). If Radbertus before him had been the quintessence of literalism, Berengar was his contrapositive—“a Luther before his time,” as Moloney calls

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him, and one whose basic position was an abjuration of Eucharistic change (118). Berengar argued that one could certainly refer to the Eucharistic gifts after consecration as the body and blood of Christ; but, for Berengar, they remained— in reality—what they had been before, bread and wine (118).15 Berengar’s defense of Ratramnus’ position was brought before Pope Leo ix at a 1050 synod, in Rome. Lanfranc, his fierce opponent (who would eventually become Archbishop of Canterbury), was present, precipitating Berengar’s provisional excommunication (O’Connor 98). Berengar nonetheless continued his semi-clandestine campaign in favor of Eucharistic symbolism (O’Connor 99). And so, at the Lateran Synod of 1059, Berengar was required— this time under Pope Nicholas—to make a profession of faith, which he himself had written: “I, Berengarius, unworthy deacon of the Church of St. Maurice at Angers, knowing the true, Catholic, and apostolic Faith, condemn all heresy … ” (qtd. in O’Connor 178). Berengar, with Lanfranc’s inconvenient aid, thus brought to the forefront the issue of Eucharistic change, with which theologians would continue to mind-bendingly wrestle for the next five centuries (99–100). If Berengar stoked controversy, he also inadvertently “breathed life into theological reflection on the problem he was raising” (Moloney 120). For one, Lanfranc, in defense of the doctrine Berengar had been forced to accept in 1059, published his own book, On the Body and Blood of the Lord. There, Lanfranc maintained that the bread and wine were converted at the moment of consecration into the essence of Christ’s blood and body—“ineffably, incomprehensibly, [and] miraculously,” he wrote, “by the workings of heavenly power” (6). By distinguishing essence from appearances, which is to say the Eucharist’s substance from its visible form, Lanfranc managed to retain “the symbolic character of the Eucharist without abandoning realism” (Kilmartin 144). Perhaps foremost for Lanfranc was that, when it came to Eucharistic conversion, he believed it to be an exercise of faith not of reason (Whalen 8). “Rather do we believe that which we do not see, that faith may exist,” he wrote quite powerfully, “for it cannot exist if what is to be believed can be perceived by the corporal senses” (qtd. in Whalen 8). (This is, of course, a belief Dante would rehearse time and time again in the Comedy.) If all these intricacies of definition are well-nigh becoming muddled for the reader, know that Berengar’s second profession of faith, made before Pope Gregory vii in 1079, was even more technical in its formulation,16 and ergo less open to any charge of “ultrarealism”, which had eventually been leveled against his earlier confession (O’Connor 180). His 1079 profession also marks the first occasion when Church authorities assimilated the “language of the philosophers

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for the expression of [the] Eucharistic faith” (Moloney 121). “I, Berengarius,” the French theologian was forced to confirm, believe in my heart and confess with my mouth that the bread and wine that are placed on the altar are, through the Mystery of the sacred prayer and the words of Our Redeemer, substantially changed [substantialiter converti] into the true and proper and life-giving Flesh and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ … . (qtd. in O’Connor 180)

Although much of this language (e.g., substance, species) had been pulled from Aristotle, its implementation was for the purposes of accentuating the concrete reality of the Eucharistic change—which, of course, made it a defense from Aristotelian rationalism, ironically (Moloney 121). Another of Berengar’s opponents, Guitmond of Aversa, also contributed to orthodox Eucharistic theology by asserting that the bread and wine were changed substantially—that is, changed in their substance into the body and blood of Christ (Whalen 9).17 This rendered the claim that the Host was not physically nourishing the person eating it practicable, as what was being chewed and ingested were only the accidents of the bread and wine—e.g., its shape, its color (9). Thus, “accidents” became the corollary of “substance,” paving the philological way for the truly definitive Church statement on transubstantiation, which would only appear in the year 1215 (9–10). If theologians were beginning to raise more sophisticated questions and engage with broader doctrinal uncertainties, this was in part because the Eucharistic controversy “coincided with the formative development of a new educational environment” (Radding and Newton 9–10), Scholasticism, which adopted a new theological and philosophical system of learning.

Wonder and dissent: The long twelfth century Ecclesiastics engaged in the rising Scholasticism of the twelfth century embraced the formulation of a doctrine of transubstantiation based on what their predecessors had begun formulating (Rogers 38). (The earliest appearance of the term transubstantiation is said to be in the eleventh-century Exposition of the Canon of the Mass, attributed to Peter Damien, where it is used specifically to denote when one substance [e.g., bread] is wholly changed into another [e.g., Christ’s Body] (Stone, History 261).)18 Indeed, the proliferation around this time of treatises on the subject is (at least to modern eyes, I would

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conjecture) nothing less than astounding. There is, just as a sample, Hildebert’s (c. 1055–1133) Short Treatise on the Sacrament of the Altar; Honorius of Autun’s (1080–1154) Eucharisation or Book on the Body and Blood of the Lord where the “idea of the ‘threefold body’ is more fully explained” (278); and Stephen of Autun (d. 1140)’s On the Sacrament of the Altar, which asserts that “It is our faith and must really be believed that when the priest says the words, ‘This is My body,’ there is no longer earthly bread but that Bread which came down from heaven” (qtd. in Stone, History 280). Hugh St. Victor (d. 1141), perhaps regarded as the period’s most eminent theologian, provides us On the Sacraments— although, contrary to later conventional wisdom, “Hugh inclines to the view that an excommunicate or avowedly heretical priest cannot validly consecrate” (Stone, History 284–285).19 As these titles reflect, the tide had turned generally toward defending transubstantiation rather than attempting to question or undermine it.20 By the early scholastic period’s close, general consensus had been reached: the change of the bread and wine took place in single moment; it was Christ’s words that resulted in that moment; and the priest intoning those words was acting as a “minister of Christ” (Kilmartin 128). Further, Christ was wholly present—“body, blood, soul, and divinity”—under the species of bread, just as he was under the species of the wine (Moloney 124). As for identifying the precise moment when consecration occurred, that would have to wait (Kilmartin 128). Nevertheless, the increasingly scholastic approach to transubstantiation had, by this time, already “brought to a halt—at least among theologians— … the reactionary, sensualistic view of sacramental real presence” (89). What was growing for theologians, in fact, was an identification of the sacramental body with Christ’s historical body (Moloney 124). As a result, an entirely new attitude was developing, one pivoting on the corporal presence of Christ in the sacraments (122–124). And what of the experience of Mass for the communicating laity? This, after all, was the period which ushered in the elevation of the Host—the “major elevation,” as it is called today (Grant 228). Mention of this compulsory elevation first appears in a statute from the synod of Paris of 1198, instructing priests, when beginning the canon of the Mass, not immediately to raise the wafer “too high so that it can be seen by the people; rather, only keep it in front of their chests while they say hoc est corpus meum and then they should elevate it so that it can be seen by all” (qtd. in Rubin, Corpus 55). While this may seem a simple extension of a more primitive rite,21 Gerard Grant maintains that “in the attitude of Christians toward the Blessed Sacrament, it worked a revolution”: “Now for the first time a ‘ceremonial and public fixation’ of the moment of

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consecration focused the attention of the faithful upon the Sacrament, leading on to what was almost a new cultus of the Eucharist, a new fervor of worship” (229). Now, with “a totally unobstructed view of the newly consecrated Host,” laity were invited to adore “the unseen God in the sacrament”(Groeschel and Monti 212). And as Robert Cabié intriguingly asserts, this viewing was most successful “when the host looked less like bread—when it was white, round, without thickness, having something of the immaterial about it, and when it presented no obstacle to the desire to contemplate a transcendent presence having nothing to do with the banal realities of daily life” (76).22 (For those already thinking ahead, I would say, yes, this certainly has bearing on Dante’s contemplative gaze into the Divine Light at the Comedy’s end.) Keep in mind, too, that most people experienced the celebration from the far side of the choir, if not through an obstructing barrier such as a rood screen, and so were generally limited to hearing Mass (75). Indeed, that became “the expression that was henceforth popular” (75); and in order to accommodate the faithful in knowing precisely when the elevation of the consecrated wafer was to occur, “a warning bell was rung beforehand” (Bokenkotter 131). Many townspeople, it is said, would rush “from church to church just to be present at the elevation,” sometimes paying the priest “a special stipend just to hold the host up higher and for a longer time,” sometimes engaging in lawsuits, even, “in order to get the best place for viewing the host” (131). Why this desire for such unobstructed and prolonged elevations? Given how low the actual reception of the sacrament had become, conceivably the laity now deemed it “more important to see the sacrament than to receive it” (Moloney 127). Or, perhaps it was because, as some people superstitiously believed, an extended viewing of the body of Christ begat a longer life in one’s own human body (Cabié 79). Either way, by the middle of the thirteenth century, belief in the efficacy of seeing the Host had expanded to such a degree that “all kinds of fanciful promises were in circulation regarding the special privileges enjoyed by him, who, on any day, saw the Body of his Maker,” such as that “[h]e was believed to be protected from sudden death, or loss of sight,” or some other such personal calamity (Thurston, “Exposition”).23 As for the theological impetus: scholars have compiled a number of explanations. Either it was “the necessary concomitant of the theological decision on the moment of transubstantiation being after the first consecration” or it was “a response to popular demands to see God” or even a “didactic gesture against heretical claims” (Rubin, Corpus 55). In fact, Cruz, following Herbert Thurston, asserts quite adamantly that heresy was the major impetus for the elevation of the Host (275). More specifically, the elevation was considered

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“a defense against the erroneous teachings of Peter Comestor (d. 1178) and Peter the Chanter (d. 1197),” who held that the bread was changed only after the words of consecration had also been spoken over the wine (275). Problematically, new heretical sects had by this time emerged. While some of these sects denied aspects of Eucharistic doctrine, they nevertheless attracted popular Christian support (or at least provoked Christian ambivalence) because of the pietistic lifestyles led by their members. (The same could not be said of many high-ranking Church members, who led absurdly opulent lives.24) One of the most notable of these ascetic sects was the Cathars,25 perhaps the very sect J. Pohle was envisioning when declaring that the sacrament’s elevation during this time was “for the express purpose of repairing by its adoration the blasphemies of heretics” (qtd. in Fisher 18). Of course, “heresy is by definition relative,” as Carol Lansing prudently observes, “since it can exist only in relation to orthodoxy” (12); but integrally bound up with the Catholics’ repudiation of the Cathars was the latter’s utter rejection of the Host as the literal flesh and body of Christ.26 In fact, the Cathars’ “fiercest invective was launched against the Eucharist”—a historical fact perhaps “lost sight of in our modern era” (Grant 232). In short, the Cathars—whose name derives from Greek Katharoi, for “pure ones” (Hamilton 174)27—were Christ-following dualists for whom material reality was something to be disdained. Like the Bogomils,28 of whom some scholars claim they were an offshoot, the Cathars believed “that what is seen is evil: flesh itself is the creation of a fallen angel, Satan” (Lambert 63). What this meant was that Christ could have been an angel, even the son of God, but in no way could he have been a man who had inhabited a fleshy body (136). Hence the Cathars’ spurning of the sacraments—and a horrific renewal in Christendom of the distressing charges of cannibalism, of orthodox Catholics eating the flesh of their God (O’Connor 42). Cathars may well have appeared “rather like earlier itinerant preachers … as pauperes Christi, living and working like the apostles, trying to be ‘good Christians’”(Grundmann 215), but somewhat at odds with this image are the substantiated accusations (at least if one trusts the documents of the 1308 inquisition in Southern France [see Ladurie]) that Cathars were “desecrating the Host in secret, and … receiving the Christian Communion hypocritically. Moreover, the Cathari had in their benedictio panis a ceremony that to pious Christians was a travesty of the Mass and of Viaticum” (Grant 245). No wonder, then, that, toward the end of the twelfth century, the heresy that most preoccupied authority was Catharism (Lambert 70). In fact, when Alan of Lille explicated what was meant by transubstantiation in his Four Books Against the Heretics (c. 1180), he was in part directing that explication against

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the Cathars (O’Connor 116). At least two of that century’s apologists defending the sacraments, moreover, acknowledged a connection between the Host’s elevation and Manichaeist denial (Grant 248). One of them, Eckbert of Schönau, considered the showing of the Host to be, in Grant’s words, “a sovereign remedy against the denial of the Real Presence,” while, for Caesar of Heisterbach, “the Host was the only efficacious means of confounding the claims of certain of the Cathari to miraculous powers” (248). Unfortunately for the Church, aims to discourage Catharism and to squelch the sect’s popularity were, as earlier intimated, less than successful. In central and northern Italy, Catharism actually succeeded in augmenting its hold (Lambert 70). Northern Italy, in fact, was the twelfth-century “land of heresy par excellence … above all because its cities prized their independence so highly that they preferred to tolerate heretics than surrender to the demands of their bishops or of popes” (6). We err in imagining a strictly differentiated and inimical relationship at this time between Roman Catholics and Cathars, however, as members of a single family were sometimes known to profess different faiths (Hamilton 176). Consider, for instance, a Catholic knight in 1207, who, when asked by the bishop of Toulouse why he and his kind were not driving out the heretics, replied, “We can’t. We have grown up with them; we are related to them; and we can see what good lives they lead” (qtd. in Hamilton 176). Nevertheless, the Church of that time “did not consider religious toleration a virtue”; it taught the truth, so it believed, and so “did not doubt that dissenters were in error” and endangering “the salvation of those whom God had entrusted to the church’s care” (Hamilton 176). When in 1209, Innocent III permitted Francis of Assisi (d. 1226) under the auspices of the Church to establish his mendicant order, the pope must surely have recognized the potential of that penitential order to aid in the inhibition of heresy. And indeed, a new sort of piety was swiftly becoming part of the Catholic fold. As Lambert tenders, “The pastoral mission of the friars … together with the development of confraternities for laymen and women who remained in the world brought a good Christian life within the range of the many—it was no longer reserved for the dedicated [Cathari] few who received the consolamentum29” (156). This is not to suggest that the Cathars were peacefully to evaporate into oblivion, as we shall soon see. Apparently it was the Franciscans’ ability to enlist popular elements in its evangelizing that proved the real revolution in the Church, giving it its new character (Barraclough 129).30 This was aided by the arrival of another important mendicant preacher and a contemporary of Francis’, Dominic (d. 1221), who, around 1206, was commissioned to combat the Cathari heretics with the

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admittedly peculiar armament of “wandering preacher” (129). Lamentably, when Dominic failed (in 1208 his legate was assassinated, and local nobles proved unable—or perhaps unwilling—to quash the Cathar heresy), Pope Innocent iii called a crusade (Lambert 104–105).

The thirteenth century and the bodies of Christ Perhaps the call of the Cathar Crusade—which would last twenty years (though Cathars would continue to be burnt at the stake into the 1320s)—illustrates best Malcolm Lambert’s shrewd admonition that one ought to resist giving too much credence to the vociferous claims by preachers that the Church was infirm: “[T]he medieval Church retained great vitality together with its scandals and defects … Nowhere could one justly speak of a mass apostasy” (94). Then again, the presumption that all Catholics were accepting of, and interpretively able to grasp, the newly emerging theology on the Eucharist is equally erroneous (Lansing 16). No doubt it was the Church’s struggle against “stubborn and incorrigible heresy” (Grundmann 58), in tandem with its necessary efforts to combat the laity’s flawed beliefs and insecurities regarding sacramental practice, that encouraged Innocent III to convene the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Although little is known about what actually took place at the council, the document that resulted, while not exactly inventing new terms of Christian belief and praxis, authoritatively codified those terms—as it did, as well, the future treatment of heresy. Canon 1, a general statement of belief, makes explicit that transubstantiation was now considered doctrine. Framed in the context of the Incarnation and of the Mass as a sacrifice, Catholics were now to believe in the one Universal Church of the faithful outside of which there is absolutely no salvation. In which there is the same priest and sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed [transubstantiatis] by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of him what he has received of us. And this sacrament no one can effect except the priest who has been duly ordained in accordance with the keys of the church, which Jesus Christ himself gave to the apostles and their successors. (qtd. in Shinners 7)

Although transubstantiation was now a doctrine, the document provided no explicit definition or explanation regarding “the change of substance or … the retention of the accidents,” thus making it much more guarded than

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the works of the theologians of the time (Stone, History 313). Still, it was, as some scholars contend, “a stand against the heresy of the [Cathars], who regarded the Eucharistic bread as mere bread, indistinguishable from other types of bread” (Snoek 48). Insisting that only “a validly ordained priest had the power to confect the Eucharist” was also conceivably a rejoinder to the Cathars (who had their own ascetic priesthood) as well as to the wandering Waldensians, who practiced as lay folk (O’Connor 186). Additionally set down, in Canon 21, was that all faithful adults were now mandated to make confession at least once a year and to “receiv[e] reverently at least at Easter the sacrament of the Eucharist” (qtd. in Shinners 9). Because the laity’s remoteness from the Eucharist now struck the Church as scandalous, “the famous Easter ‘duty,’ still a Church regulation today,” was decreed, in order to scotch such delinquency (Collins 30).31 Somewhat relevant to our interests, too, is Canon 10, which, with respect to “the salvation of the Christian people,” remarks on the “food of the word of God”: this food, Lateran IV declares, “is above all necessary, because as the body is nourished by material food, so is the soul nourished by spiritual food, since ‘not in bread alone doth man live, but in every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God’ [Matt. 4.4] … ” (qtd. in Shinners 7). Concern for the Eucharist’s physical protection from sacrilege—which ripples overtly with anxiety over heresy—resulted in the mandate that, in all churches, “the chrism [consecrated oil] and the Eucharist be kept under faithful guard and be locked up, so that no presumptuous hand be laid on them for any horrible or wicked purpose” (qtd. in Groeschel and Monti 212). As for the 1215 Council’s more explicit treatment of heresy, it went as follows: We excommunicate and anathemise every heresy that raises against the holy, orthodox and Catholic faith which we have above explained; condemning all heretics under whatever names they may be known, for while they have different faces they are nevertheless bound to each other by their tails, since in all of them vanity is a common element. (qtd. in Anderson and Bellenger.152)

And so, all across Europe, diocesan councils set about disseminating the new measures, often in emphatically simple terms, so that the requirements could be passed on by parish priests “in the vernacular, to their flocks” (Arnold 37). Only well into the thirteenth century were these faith-related concerns—this “‘campaign of interior reconquest,’” as André Vauchez paints it—to reach a wider audience (Arnold 38). Further, in having defined the basic religious duties demanded of all Christians (Shinners 6), this novel “template for Christianity,”

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in effect, created the Church of the High Middle Ages—and would continue to sustain it until well into the sixteenth century (Arnold 37). By the time of Francis of Assisi’s death in 1226, Eucharistic devotion had achieved “a permanent, clear, and universal acceptance,” no doubt in part because of the intensive evangelizing of friars like Francis and his cohort Anthony of Padua (Groeschel and Monti 121). Local populations sympathetic to the heretics were not reporting them to the bishop, however, and so, around 1233, Pope Gregory ix authorized the Inquisition (Hamilton 176). Special negotiators (with the full powers of the papacy) were equipped to snuff out apostates (Lambert 108). This was a commission of inquiry, mind you, which is to say that it was not yet the oppressive, bloodthirsty (Spanish) Church exercising its penal powers; rather, these were agents entrusted “with detecting those guilty of heresy and … taking depositions from them under oath” (Hamilton 176–177). In fact, the “vast majority of those whom it found guilty were dismissed with canonical penances”—in large measure because of a reluctance to execute those who might otherwise be converted (177).32 “Above everything else,” exhorted Francis in his Testament, which he dictated not long before his death, “I want [the] most holy Sacrament to be honoured and venerated and reserved in places which are richly ornamented” (qtd. in Groeschel and Monti 124)—and by the middle of the thirteenth century, such piety-cum-pageantry would be fully in play. So universal would the Host’s elevation have become—both physically and metaphysically—that, sometimes, a black veil was “extended behind the altar, to throw the sight [of it] into greater relief ” (Fitzpatrick 224). With similar theatrical aplomb, the Host was sometimes exposed to the dead, and it became “customary to communicate before fighting a duel” (224). In this sense, worship of the Host came increasingly to parallel familiar, older forms of veneration, such as of saints’ relics (Lansing 163). And given that lay persons were now completely deprived of the chalice, piety became almost exclusively directed toward the Host (Snoek 40). John H. Arnold proposes that the “broad move, across the high Middle Ages, from depicting Christ as King (and therefore, in some senses, transcendent) to Christ as suffering man (emphasizing his bodily nature)” was itself facilitated by the growing emphasis placed on the Eucharist and on Christ’s Real Presence in the Eucharist (53). But did this succeed in allaying perplexity among the laity regarding how Christ could be in so many places simultaneously—and, even more, trepidation about what it meant to ingest Christ’s actual body? What, for instance, if a beast were to eat the Host? What if a drop of Christ’s blood were spilled? If literalism oftentimes served as an impediment to doctrinal acceptance, preachers at least

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recognized the conceptual difficulty of having to deal with Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist. “It is a big thing to think of that the bread and wine become Christ’s true body and blood,” admitted Remigio de Girolami, an Italian Dominican, (1235–1319) in a sermon. “It is a big thing to think of, that it should be so many places, on all the altars, in heaven and on earth, in over 100,000 places … But God is there to help our faith, so that a man must not say: ‘What is this that I am supposed to believe?’” (qtd. in Arnold 222–223). Pastors were thus advised to narrate stories that might demonstrate “to ‘simple people’ that the Eucharist is not merely a ‘figure’ of Christ’s body, but its real presence” (222–223). So trained did the medieval mind become in thinking of the transubstantiated wafer as Christ in his body—and especially of Christ “in one of his suffering personas, as a sacrificed child”—that “horrific tales of a bleeding child Christ in the host were tolerated within the culture, and could circulate in exempla” (Rubin, Corpus 137). A complex and thoroughly compelling synthesis of holy fear and holy endorsement can be found, for instance, in the Host-related miracles that flourished during the thirteenth century. While Christ’s Real Presence in the Host and the Host’s resultant puissance had been “persistent themes in devotional literature from the twelfth century” (Shinners 89), it was definitely after the Fourth Lateran Council—all the way into the early 1300s, in fact—that Eucharistic miracles proliferated. Consider the titles that appear in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Miracles of the Eucharist (c. 1220–1235) alone: “Of a priest who keeping the host in his mouth with wicked intent, found himself unable to leave the church … Of the Lord’s body which when cast into the river drowned some heretics … Of the priest of Wickindisburg who felt a doubt in saying the canon and beheld raw flesh … ” (qtd. in Shinners 90–94). And then there is “Of bees who built a shrine for the body of the Lord,” in which a woman attempting to safeguard her honeybees from a plague places a Host pocketed during Mass into one of her hives: Wonderful power of God! The insects recognized their creator, and built a most beautiful chapel with wonderful skill from the sweetest honeycomb for their most gracious guest, and placed it in an altar of the same material, and laid upon it the most sacred body. (qtd. in Shinners 92)33

In the miracle of Daroca in Spain (1239), as recounted by Cruz in Eucharistic Miracles, a nameless, skeptical priest was raising the chalice during Mass when he wondered about the real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. All at once, the corpus on the large altar crucifix before him seemed to come alive. One of

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the hands of Our Lord detached itself from the cross, stretched forward, and removed the chalice from the hands of the priest! With shock and fear, he stepped backward, gazed intently at the miracle, and fervently repented his doubt. (56)

There is also a purportedly biographical tale about Louis IX (d. 1270), French king (and eventually saint), who once, during the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel in his residence, was working in his study when a courtier excitedly burst in, exclaiming, “Sire, the infant Jesus is appearing in the Host upon the altar!” The [king] calmly continued his writing, quietly replying, “I could not believe more firmly in Christ’s presence in the Eucharist if I were to behold a miracle.” (207)

Granted, some of these miracles may have been appended to the vitae of saints, but others likely did happen during their lives, even if the events were later embellished. Most germane for us—and certainly to Dante’s Italy— was the 1263 miracle of Bolsena, which came to be lavishly celebrated in the hill-town of Orvieto, some 100 miles south of Florence (Lansing 104). This is the very town—by no accident, certainly—where Catharism was still rampant and where, following the Bolsena miracle, the pope authorized the Corpus Christi feast which honored the Eucharist. Presumably, qualms about transubstantiation were piously purged through this miracle and the gauntlet to Catharism explicitly thrown down (104). In the Orvietan tradition, the priest was Peter of Prague, a Bohemian, who, while passing through the little town of Bolsena, celebrated Mass in the church of Santa Cristina. Barely had he uttered the words of consecration when the altar cloths began to drip blood (164)—blood seeping, as well, “from the consecrated Host and trickl[ing] over his hands onto the altar” (Cruz 59). Thus were the relics of this miracle carried to Orvieto, where, in its cathedral, those bloodstained linens can still be seen to this day. Hardly was this the only Italian Eucharistic miracle with overt links to the Cathari. In another story, the Franciscan Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) found himself being questioned by a man named Boniville, a potential Cathari, who obdurately rejected a belief in the Real Presence. Anthony, meanwhile, steadfastly affirmed it, and so, as a test, one or the other suggested that the choice be made by Boniville’s mule. Both men agreed … . The mule took no notice of the food, but fell to its knees before the Blessed Sacrament. The Catholics who witnessed the miracle expressed unbounded joy, while the unbelievers were thoroughly confused. Boniville is said to have been subsequently converted, together with a great number of heretics. (207–208)

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Then there is Clare of Assissi (d. 1253), who is said to have fended off Saracen mercenaries simply by holding up the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance (an anachronistic deterrent, mind you, since monstrances had not yet come into common use) (Groeschel and Monti 121). Eucharistic miracles sometimes embodied additional ideological motivations, to be sure. Pope Innocent iii, for instance, “tells of a Jew who, wishing to abuse a consecrated particle, put it in his strong-box, only to find later that all his coins had been turned into particles” (Fitzpatrick 224).34 Late medieval stories about Jews and other unorthodox sorts sacrilegiously stabbing Hosts until they bled were quite common (Hamilton 191). While their aim may have been to eradicate skepticism and embolden Christian belief, such stories, not surprisingly, fueled suspicion and animosity toward other religious groups. By the mid-1250s, torture in dealing with heretics was formally sanctioned by the Church, and the Florentine fight against recreants which ensued proved far more violent than that which had transpired in Orvieto (Lansing 72). Florence had become an important Cathar center by the mid-1200s, with many of its Cathars deriving “from a cluster of rising banking and mercantile lineages” (72). Then again, the inquisitorial repression did not go gently in many parts of Italy, in part because suspicion of the interrogators remained. Some Cathars even struck back: “in the Valtellina an inquisitor was murdered,” and in 1279, Parma sacked its Dominican convent; nevertheless, by the century’s end, “even Milan, the ancient capital of heresy, had been brought to order” (Lambert 155).35 While Cathars more “fugitive in character” continued to inhabit Florence to the end of the thirteenth century (Stephens 29–31), the last major series of trials against them took place in Bologna between 1291 and 1309 (Lambert 155). As for the anti-doctrinal skepticism regarding the Eucharist, that persisted beyond the turn of the century—at least if we are to trust the papally-appointed Dominican inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard of Gui (c. 1261–1331), who composed a manual for his fellow examiners (Shinners 457). Entitling it Technique for the Work of Inquest into Heretical Depravity, he beseeched within its pages Franciscan and Dominican alike to “inquire especially into those things that smack of any possible superstition, irreverence, or insult towards the church’s sacraments, most especially toward the sacrament of the Lord’s Body”; as well, they were to “inquire about the practice of retaining the Eucharist, or of stealing chrism or holy oil from the church” (qtd. in Shinners 457–458). But challenges to the Eucharist were not confined exclusively to outside the Church (Burr 5). Philosophical speculation on doctrine within the ecclesiastical universities sometimes engendered conclusions that appeared potentially

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“dangerous to the faith” (5). While such works were an attempt to elucidate transubstantiation realistically (O’Connor 115)—to justify the logic of it— oftentimes the “scientific” theology employed only deepened the chasm of latent anxiety. What happened, for instance, theologians inquired, “when the Eucharist suffered the indignities of being lost, or of corrupting, or of being consumed by rodents and the like” (115)? While the question may seem “ridiculous” to us, as James T. O’Connor concedes, “it is evidence of the realistic views that Christians had of the Eucharistic Presence. It was a question that served as a type of ‘limit situation’” (115). In other words, fascination with the problem of the Eucharistic presence was no less inspired “by concrete dangers, [than] by the very dynamics of the scholastic enterprise”: The great scholastics did not shrink from the possibility that there was something supernatural about Christ’s body being in several places at once, but they certainly wanted to counter the charge that it was flatly self-contradictory to say that a single body was so … . [T]hey were eager to show that the notion of accidens sine subiecto did not defy the very definition of an accident. (Burr 6–7)

At the same time, how could one rightly expect them to explain such central doctrines in terms that the predominately non-literate laity could understand (Hamilton 111)? Doing so, as Bernard Hamilton nicely contextualizes, would be akin to “asking scientists now to explain quantum physics in terms comprehensible to people who have no concept of number. The gulf between the highly articulate and intellectual faith of trained theologians and the simple beliefs of the mass of the laity in the later Middle Ages was almost unbridgeable” (111). Still, the modus operandi of scholastic theology also arguably obstructed alternate modes of Eucharistic encounter. As Darwell Stone subtly bemoans, its methods reflect a most excellent instance of the way in which theological interest in the Christic sacrifice had been all but “crushed out by the interest in the elaboration of the doctrine of the presence and gift” (314). The thirteenthcentury philosophers’ extended use of Aristotle’s writing (314), their veritable “bondage” to his theory (395), no doubt added to an intensity of scholastic flavor to their writings on the Eucharist. No one arguably fits more squarely into that descriptively scholastic box than Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)— and yet, as we shall later see, he was also the one putatively called upon to make transubstantiation intelligible to the “illiterate,” and to have done so in genuinely moving and poetical ways. I elect to delay the particulars of Thomas’ philosophical and liturgical contributions to the Eucharistic discourse, as well

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as those of his fellow theologians, due to the relevancy they bear to Dante’s journey through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. That is, I shall allow those contributions to emerge in more contextually relevant (and hence, hopefully, less arid) ways in the chapters that ensue. While the scholastic method may scare off today’s students, even causing them to wonder, not unreasonably, if a theologian’s technical rhetorical craftsmanship had long superseded his belief, we should refrain from being too quick to pass spiritual judgment. Consider the case of Thomas’ contemporary, Bonaventure (1221–1274), who, for reasons of health, was unable on his deathbed to receive Viaticum and, so, he “requested that the Blessed Sacrament, enclosed within a pyx, be placed upon his heart” (Groeschel and Monti 222). And then there is the Legenda maior, Bonaventure’s spiritually stirring biography of St. Francis, which is rife with powerful Eucharistic imagery. As Ann W. Astell summarizes of what Bonaventure managed to accomplish in that work, it is nothing less than a picture of a Francis who not only receives Holy Communion often and ardently … , but who also treasures every morsel of bread as a reminder of the Eucharist as “daily bread” (Matt. 6:11) and a sign of God’s sustenance … [who is] “refreshed more by the gift of God’s generosity than by the food they had received for their bodies” … [and who] rejoices in the bread procured through begging, calling it by a eucharistic name, “the bread of angels.” (133–134)

Sometimes, the scholastics’ theology could even strike a lyrical and loving chord—and this from within the elucidatory scientific tangle. For example, Bonaventure, in parsing Peter Lombard’s claim in his Sentences36 that the Eucharist is eaten in a “twofold” manner—which is to say, sacramentally and spiritually—that engagement, so Bonaventure comments, arises from certain communicants catching the Eucharist “with the mouth of the body, and these [eat] sacramentally; certain ones truly with the mouth of the heart, and these [eat] spiritually; whence according to the twofold mouth is the twofold eating … .” (Commentary). Bonaventure’s biographical associations with Francis of Assisi, as well as his more intimate and mystical sensibility perhaps, may make him seem more of his time than Thomas Aquinas; but the (understandable) impulse to categorize them in this way obscures the truth. Thomas Aquinas, in fact, blended “a bit more neatly” into his thirteenth-century environment than today’s student might suspect. As David Burr points out, the “centrality enjoyed by Aquinas in modern history textbooks would only be achieved over the centuries with the

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aid of Dante, John XXII, Leo XIII, and a host of others” (99). Further, there is often a tendency today—including in how Thomas gets interpreted in studies of the Comedy—to underplay his religiosity and to overplay the Aristotelian impulses in his work and his more secularly-oriented passages on war, politics, ethics, and so forth. But it would be “every bit false,” as Chesterton boldly asserts, “to say that Aquinas drew his primary inspiration from Aristotle” or to suggest that his whole being was not devotionally directed: “he passionately loved the Catholic worship long before he found he had to fight for it” (15). At the heart of Thomas’ theological system, after all, is his emphatic declaration that certain truths are intrinsically inaccessible to reason—and among these is the doctrine of the Trinity (Wicksteed 98). Moreover, “The common spiritual good of the whole Church,” he writes, “is substantially contained in the Sacrament of the Eucharist” (qtd. in O’Connor 82)—and Thomas earnestly strove “to preserve belief in the spiritual character of the Eucharistic presence” (Stone, History 334). Sometimes he is, in fact, referred to as “the Eucharistic Doctor” (Cruz xvii). Indeed, his study of the Eucharistic sacrament exemplifies the attempt by orthodox theologians to assert their authority over “the meaning of Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers on the Blessed Sacrament”—not to mention, over unorthodoxies, both within and without Christianity (Groeschel and Monti 117). While, to a notable extent, Thomas was following the common teaching of his day (Kilmartin 249–250), what he did that was novel was to plait “the demands of reason as understood in his time with the inherited beliefs of the Church” and thereby to reconcile “theological and spiritual truth with philosophic thought” (though some logicians today may consider that reconciliation fallaciously reached) (Stone, History 323). Again I will leave to Chapter 5 the particulars regarding his theological explication of Eucharistic conversion; but, it is worth our giving Thomas space here to account for why such conversion happens by divine providence: First, because it is not customary but abhorrent for men to eat man’s flesh and to drink man’s blood. Therefore Christ’s flesh and blood are set before us to be taken under the appearances of those things which are of frequent use, namely bread and wine. Secondly, lest this sacrament should be mocked at by the infidels, if we ate our Lord under his proper appearance. Thirdly, in order that, while we take the Lord’s body and blood invisibly, this fact may avail towards the merit of faith. (qtd. in Anderson and Bellenger 193)

As for why the Body and Blood Christ need to be present in this Sacrament: it is because that is what makes the Mass a true sacrifice, and not merely a

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commemorative or purely symbolic event (O’Connor 199). The Eucharist contains the “Christ who has suffered” (qtd. in O’Connor 199). For Thomas, as for a number of his theological predecessors, the distinction between sacramental and spiritual eating was paramount. Sacramental eating involved the physical act of receiving the Eucharist, whereas spiritual eating added an additional element to the necessary sacramental eating: the body and blood of Christ, such that grace was received (Whalen 15). Only through spiritual eating, Thomas asserted, did a communicant spiritually unite with Christ (15). But what if—as “sometimes happens,” Thomas granted—“a fly or spider or some venomous creature falls into the chalice after consecration” (qtd. in Whalen ix)? What if “by the priest’s carelessness the blood of Christ is spilt, or that he vomits the sacrament received, or else that the consecrated hosts are kept so long that they decay or are nibbled by mice” (ix)? As bemusedly old-fashioned as these problems may seem, in medieval times they posed a genuine problem from both pastoral and doctrinal standpoints (Mazza 220). Heretics, especially Cathars, had, in fact, used these very sorts of picayune bugs to invalidate Church teachings on the Eucharist (221). To some extent, then, Thomas, in addressing them, was trying to defend against the Cathars. Nevertheless, he argued that, yes, the mouse would be eating the Body of Christ—and so offered explicit instructions regarding how to treat creatures who came into contact with the sacraments: “If anything of the sort happens after consecration, [an] insect ought to be cautiously caught, thoroughly washed, and burnt, and the ablutions and ashes together poured into the piscina” (qtd. in Whalen ix). As for Hosts that had been ferreted out by mice, the neglectful priests responsible for such occurrences were to do penance, and Hosts found to be entire were to be “reverently kept or consumed, because so long as they be entire the body of Christ is there” (qtd. in Whalen ix).37 The formulation that ultimately satisfied Thomas—i.e., of the species realizing Christ’s bodily presence but in a way that was decidedly spiritual, invisible, and non-material—was, as Miri Rubin cedes, “not easily teachable, nor did it purport to be so” (Corpus 25). Perhaps that is why many of his contemporaries argued against his thesis38 and, in doing so, sided with the more mystically oriented Hugh St. Victor, whose thesis did not unduly limit the sphere of God’s power. (That is, Christ could be present without any conversion needing to happen (Burr 100)). And yet, if one takes into account Thomas’ assumed associations with that newly instituted feast of Corpus Christi, one is hard-pressed not to appreciate his capacity to make his theological approach

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more accessible, more palatable, and even more mystically evocative, as eventually we shall see. In advance of that, it may be worth addressing the incident that occasioned the institution of the Corpus Christi feast—and which came, incidentally (and hardly accidentally), on the heels of the Eucharistic controversies associated with Berengar (Fisher 17). The impetus for the feast begins with a sixteen-year-old girl named Juliana (b. 1193), who had a vision of “the full moon whose brightness was disfigured by a single dark spot” (Cruz 276). This, she was informed by a heavenly voice, was meant to signal Christ’s desire for the establishment of a new feast. “At present the celebration of this mystery is only observed on Maundy Thursday,” the voice told her, “but on that day My sufferings and death are the principal objects of consideration; therefore, I desire another day to be set apart in which it shall be celebrated by the whole of Christendom” (qtd. in Cruz 276). Three more terrestrial reasons were given for this request: one, it would confirm faith in the Eucharist against future attacks on its legitimacy; two, a sincere adoration of the Host would strengthen the faithful; and three, loving reparation would be made for the impious irreverence heretofore shown to the Blessed Sacrament (Cruz 276). Urban IV, prior to becoming pope, had been one of the first to declare Juliana’s visions genuine; and in a desire to extend the originally Belgian celebration to all Christendom, he published the bull Transiturus (Cruz 277). This was in 1264—a mere year before Dante’s birth—during a long residence in Orvieto.39 The Eucharistic miracle that had occurred in the nearby village of Bolsena prompted his lodging decisions, as conceivably did his desire symbolically to quash regional Catharism. The feast was intended as a celebration of the Body of the Lord via public procession, with the officials’ supremacy displayed through their carrying of the relics of the Bolsena miracle—relics intended no less to “confound heretics” than to demonstrate the “truth of Catholic teaching on the body’s potential for sanctity” (Lansing 13). Lyrically exuberant and “more Patristic than Scholastic in its approach,” Urban IV’s bull is “arguably the most beautiful document on the Eucharist ever composed by a successor of Peter,” claims O’Connor (193). As for whether it merits such encomia, that can be gleaned through a swift assessment of the following excerpt: O worthy memorial, never to be omitted, in which we call to mind that our death is dead, that our destruction has been destroyed, that the life-giving Wood nailed to the cross has brought to us the fruit of salvation … He made Himself our food. O unique and wonderful generosity, when the Giver comes as the Gift, and that which is given is the same as He who gives … [W]e think

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Urban IV’s bull also possibly inaugurates the use vis-à-vis the Eucharist of the term Real Presence, a term now widespread in Catholic theology (O’Connor 193–197). Notwithstanding Urban IV’s poetic elegance—and invective at heretics—he established that the feast of Corpus Christi was to be celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (eight weeks after Easter, essentially) (Cruz 277). A special Office —that is, “a selection of psalms, readings, antiphons, prayers and hymns”—would be commissioned to mark the occasion, and for that task, it is said, the Pope selected Thomas Aquinas (Groeschel and Monti 226). While some scholars conjecture that Thomas’ role in its composition is more legend than fact, this liturgical office which some author produced has been hailed a literary masterpiece (226) and “one of the most beautiful in the Roman Breviary” (Cruz 277). Consider, for instance, the following, which comes from the Office of Readings: “O precious and wonderful banquet that brings us salvation and contains all sweetness! Could anything be of more intrinsic value? Under the old law it was the flesh of calves and goats that was offered, but here Christ himself, the true God, is set before us as our food. What could be more wonderful than this?” (Aquinas, “Saint”). Not only is the tenor of these readings passionate and sublime; the liturgy, quite remarkably, is also theologically precise, even employing “Aristotelian terminology to state with some exactness the idea of the Real Presence” (Lansing 165). In a Corpus Christi sermon on a Lukan parable (14:16–24), Thomas (or his double) even manages to link a “pastoral emphasis on Eucharistic devotion” with a condemnation of those who reject the articles of faith (165). In Thomas’ novel reading of this parable, invited guests who choose not to attend a feast are commuted into heretics, Jews and pagans (Lansing 165). As for Thomas’ hymns, they are all the more astounding for their ability to engage with—and sans any relinquishment of joy or elegance—challenging sacramental theology. These we shall contemplate later, in Chapter 5. For readers hitherto presented with a somewhat abridged—and perhaps religiously expurgated—version of Thomas’ Summa, all this, to reprise, may come as a surprise. I can only hope this meager offering upfront of Thomas’ writings succeeds in revealing that “entirely different side of [Thomas’] genius,” as G.K. Chesterton avers (113). Of course Thomas was not alone in producing texts that could be poetic and pedagogical—and, arguably, also propagandistic. This obsession with the wondrously Hidden God was, in fact, a Western European phenomenon, and one that would continue well into the next century (Rubin,

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Corpus 157).40 That the obsession was founded on the double signification of the Eucharist—on the consecrated wafer as being both one thing and another—is crucial, I shall argue, to understanding Dante’s Comedy. Multiple significations abound in his poem, with discrete words, human characters, beasts we encounter, and even the nature of the latter’s beastliness repeatedly signifying both one thing and another; and this, I hope to show, is not in the least unrelated to the Eucharist. Ultimately the poem operates, I shall suggest, as a means of reflecting and glorifying that “Bread of Angels,” which is Christ as the Host; as the Hidden God; as both “the One hidden under the sign” (to quote Aquinas) and “an invisible grace in a visible form” (in a formula popularly attributed to Augustine). By the time Dante was writing his Comedy, the issue of the Real Presence had become “less hotly contested than it had been in the eleventh and twelfth centuries” (Treherne, “Ekphrasis” 184). By the first quarter of the fourteenth century, in fact, right around the time Dante was likely composing Paradise, the universal observance of the Corpus Christi feast became fully vested (Groeschel and Monti 234). But even if Dante did not participate in one of the Corpus Christi parades that were rapidly instituted in a host of cities (its papal reconfirmation after all, came only in 1317, four years prior to Dante’s death), certainly when he attended Mass, or marched in other feast-related processions,41 or even possibly “spent nights of vigil in adoration and prayer”— all this he did, like every other Christian, in order not to be “deprived of the Eucharist” (O’Connor 175). In that sense, Dante was a direct beneficiary of the late thirteenth-century rise in educational standards, which had produced the new stress in Eucharistic fervor on the individual soul’s experience of God outside the Church’s mediation (Lambert 192). Or, to put it more precisely, those ecclesiastics who are repeatedly shown in the first half of Dante’s poem to be skeptical, decadent, licentious, simonizing, and sometimes even all-out evil remain forever incapable of sullying the purity and godliness of the Eucharist. But here I am getting ahead of myself. Before we journey to the realm of that Bread of Angels, we must first, like Dante the Pilgrim, sustain the carnal—and sometimes cannibalistic—spectacle of those whom Dante the Poet consigned to Hell.

Notes 1 Ignatius of Antioch (c. 50–117), who speaks of the Eucharist—mysteriously—as the “Bread of God” (O’Connor 13) belongs in this category (Stone, History 25).

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2 This is Tertullian (c. 160–225). As A. Harnack advises, “at the time ‘symbol’ denoted a thing which in some kind of way really is what it signifies” (qtd. in Stone, History 30). In other words, the term figura is used by Tertullian “not to signify a purely symbolic interpretation but to show the sacramental realism of the Eucharist” (Mazza 118–120). 3 This comprises the Teachings of the Twelve Apostles. 4 There is evidence during the early Church “of different customs from different quarters. In Italy in the fourth century the consecration was associated with the recitation of our Lord’s words at the institution of the Sacrament. In Egypt the invocation of the Word, and later the invocation of the Holy Ghost, was regarded as the distinctive act of consecration” (Stone, History 87). 5 Not long after, Jerome (347–420) will explicitly mention “a difference between pre-Easter and post-Easter Body,” affirming “that the Eucharistic Body is the risen Body of Christ”; only later theology “will be able to express the difference as one of modality, not of identity … And how does the Body of Christ that is the Church differ from the Eucharistic and risen Body of the Lord? To all these questions no explicit answer can be found until after the close of the Patristic period” (O’Connor 45). 6 The Great Schism of 1054 resulted in the Eastern (Greek) Orthodox and Western (Latin) Roman Catholic churches (“Great Schism”). Although multiple theological, doctrinal, and political points of conflict and estrangement occasioned their split, one was definitely Eucharist-related: the Greek church used leavened bread and the Latin church unleavened bread. 7 Ambrose’s two works dealing expressly with the Eucharist are De Sacramentis and De Mysteriis (both c. 390) (O’Connor 37). Ambrose was also ostensibly the first writer “to devote an entire treatise to the subject of the sacraments” (Rogers 21). 8 Augustine wrote this in his Sermons. 9 He did believe, however, that the wicked received the sacraments with dissimilar effects (Stone, History 96). 10 Gregory admirably attempts to explain this mysterious aspect of the Eucharist, argues O’Connor, by setting out “to answer the profound question: How is the whole Christ received entirely by the thousands who partake of the Eucharist throughout the world; how, that is, is Christ not divided when the Eucharistic elements are multiplied and subsequently consumed by many?” (36–37). In short, St. Gregory answers that they are totally assimilated “into the Body of Christ” (36–37). 11 The first term comes from Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395), the second from John Chrysostom (c. 347–407). 12 This is attributed to Alcuin (c. 730s–804), purported writer of Confessions of Faith. Even if Alcuin wasn’t its author, the treatise’s viewpoint is, as Stone states, a good representation of Western thought and belief in the eighth and ninth centuries (History 201).

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13 Originally the Mass was celebrated on Sunday, but by around the seventh century, the practice had spread to other days of the week, partly to fulfill requests for Masses (Foley 71). 14 Charles the Bald had sent Radbertus’ book to Ratramnus, with the injunction that Ratramnus answer two questions: “(1) Is the Eucharist the body of Christ in a mystery or in reality? (2) What is the relation of the Eucharistic to the natural body?” (Rogers 33). 15 In his Rescriptum contra Lanfrancum, a later rejoinder to Lanfranc, Berengar “justifies himself by saying that there are many places in the Scriptures in which Jesus speaks in metaphor: He is the cornerstone, the lion, the lamb,” and that this is not unlike the priest saying during the Mass that the bread is Christ (Mazza 191–192). 16 This one was also more explicit than the one Berengar had written in 1078, which Pope Gregory vii had retrospectively decided was too equivocal, leaving room for Berengar “to maintain that the bread and wine also remained what they had been before Consecration” (O’Connor 111). 17 Thus, Alger of Liège (c. 1070–1131) can later write in On the Sacraments of the Lord’s Body and Blood that, at consecration, the substance of the elements is converted into the substance of Christ’s flesh and blood: “what is there is not seen, and what is seen is not there”—in other words, “the flesh itself, since it is local, is really and substantially present both in heaven and on earth,” while “the flesh and blood of Christ are really eaten and drunk by the people, while Christ Himself abides living and whole in His kingdom” (qtd. in Stone, History 270). 18 Contradictory information appears regarding the original appearance of the term. According to Kilmartin, “The application of the verb transsubstantiare to the process of change is first found in the middle of the twelfth century in the Sententiae of Rolando Bandinelli (b. c. 1105), the later Pope Alexander iii (1159– 1181)” (145). 19 Hugh St. Victor is also said to have inaugurated mysticism, purportedly in reaction to the “contentious theology” of men like Abelard (Rogers 52). 20 Of relevant note is that originally

the historically physical body of Christ had been referred to as “proprium et verum corpus,” the body of Christ in the host referred to as “corpus mysticum,” and the body of the church and its members referred to as “corpus Christi.” At some point during the twelfth century, the increased insistence on the real presence necessitated the use of the term “corpus verum” to refer to the host. “Corpus mysticum” would come to be used to refer to the body of the church, while “corpus Christi” would come to refer to part or all of a system of meaning that included host, community, and identity. (Price 26).

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21 As Cruz notes, “all the ancient liturgical writings, including the Apostolic Constitutions, had an elevation of the Blessed Sacrament just before Holy Communion so that the people could see the consecrated Host” (275). 22 Anyone who recalls pre-Vatican II Latin Mass or who has attended one of the handful of churches that still offer Latin “Extraordinary Masses” without knowing Latin oneself perhaps has experienced the power of that clean, white, singular Host suddenly raised above the Latin “gibberish” and sight of the priest’s back. 23 According to Cabié, “the last quarter of the thirteenth century witnessed the elevation of the chalice as well” (76). Further, some accept that “the legend of the Holy Grail was a symbolic expression of this belief, in which a person is saved by looking at the sacred vessel” (79). 24 The twelfth-century was the age of Bernard and the Cistercians, and so asceticism had been given an extremely high value; as a result, Cathari priests appeared very much like models “follow[ing] the pattern of the poor, wandering preacher” (Lambert 63). 25 The other notable group was the Waldensians. Originally a merchant, Pièrre Valdès (Peter Waldo in English) had the simple—and, shall we say, prematurely Franciscan—desire to lead a life of poverty and to preach “on the lines of the gospel texts”; unlike earlier wandering preachers, Valdès was a layman and concerned with “self-instruction through vernacular translations of Scripture and the Fathers” (Lambert 71)—not to mention, that he permitted lay adherents of both sexes (77). Also worth mentioning are the Humiliati of northern Italy, who “aimed to lead a purer ethical life in the world in accord with the gospels without renouncing marriage” (74). 26 Historically one might construe this heresy as somewhat paradoxical, given that “the earlier Christian ages had been excessively anti-corporeal and [themselves] too near the danger-line of Manichean mysticism” (Chesterton 61). 27 This, they were called in Germany, while in Flanders—whence presumably they had come—they were “Piphles,” and in France, because of their weaving, “Texerant” (Lambert 65). They are sometimes popularly referred to as Albigensians, due to their association with the Languedoc city of Albi. Cathars, however, is the term most widely used today to refer to the twelfth-century’s “new heresy” (65). 28 Bogomil had been a Bulgarian village priest in the tenth century (Lambert 63). 29 The consolamentum was the Cathars’ own sacramental baptism into the Holy Spirit. 30 Although Francis purportedly had no specific goal of confuting heresy, eventually the Franciscans came to play an important part directly against heresy through preaching, the intellectual refutation of error, the writing of treatises, and a full apostolate in the towns … But their most distinctive contribution lay in the revolution they helped to bring about in popular piety through their stress on the incidents of Christ’s life and His sufferings, and their acceptance of the created

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31

32

33

34

35

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world and joy in nature. It was the indirect answer to Cathar rejection of the world and their non-human Jesus (Lambert 105). In spite of the Lateran IV decree, three communions were recommended by most synodal legislation (Rubin, Corpus 70). As Maurice of Sully, bishop of Paris (d. 1196), exhorted in a sermon, “This you must know, that just like at Easter, so at Pentecost and at Christmas, all Christians must communicate in the Lord’s flesh” (qtd. in Rubin, Corpus 70). In 1310, the Florentine sumptuary legislation “similarly recommended communion on these three feasts, and made that at Easter obligatory” (Rubin, Corpus 70). One man, for instance, “was sentenced by the Inquisitor in Vicenza in 1292 for ‘speaking evil of the body of Christ’”; the man “had raised a large lasagna on high and pointed out, ‘Could I not say that this lasagna is the body of Christ, as the priests say when they raise their calestas [wafers] when they celebrate [Mass]?’”(Lansing 100). Often, doubt in transubstantiation was ascribed to women. In a famous miracle attributed to Gregory the Great, a woman laughed just as Gregory was about to put a consecrated Host on her tongue. Placing it instead on the altar, he inquired why the woman was laughing: “Because you called this bread, which I made with my own hands, the ‘Body of the Lord.’” Gregory prostrated himself, and when he rose, the bread had changed into a finger—which resulted in the woman immediately recovering her faith. Again, Gregory prayed and the flesh became bread once more, which he then gave to the woman (Lansing 102). Before he was pope, Innocent iii—then Lothar of Segni—had written his own book on the Eucharist, On the Holy Mystery of the Altar (O’Connor 184). There, he distinguished between “The real body of Christ [which] is eaten sacramentally, that is, under the species; [and] the mystical body [which] is eaten spiritually, that is, in faith under the species of bread, in faith of heart. ‘Both good and bad eat the body of Christ, but the good to salvation, the bad to judgment’” (qtd. in Stone History 310–311). Although the Inquisition contributed to heresy’s decline in the thirteenth century, some measure of credit need go to those mendicant orders whose “intensive evangelization of the west” had, by this time, “helped in the erosion of support for heresy, as well as in giving new vigour to Catholicism” (Hamilton 177). In his Sentences, Peter Lombard (c. 1096–1164) had gathered and codified, without any pretense of originality, all the Fathers’ opinions about Christian theology (Rogers 63). On this lively point Bonaventure completely disagreed with Thomas. Bonaventure, who adopted a personal position in this regard, argued, in the words of Mazza, “that Christ is present under the species of the Sacrament only to the extent that the Sacrament is ordered to human use” (221). For Thomas, this approach of Bonaventure’s “derogat[ed] from the truth of the Sacrament” (221). Incidentally, not

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Dante’s Sacred Poem all of Thomas’ Dominican brothers followed his theological lead regarding Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. The tracts of “such theologians as Jacob of Metz, Durand of St. Pourçain, and John of Paris vividly demonstrate the varieties of eucharistic theology which flourished within the Dominican order at the turn of the fourteenth century” (Burr 25–26). They also argued against Bonaventure’s similar thesis. In fact, often that thesis is referred to as Thomist-Bonaventuran (Burr 99–100). See, however, n. 24. “This presence was overwhelming,” as Lansing states, as the popes “had as many as two hundred salaried officials and retainers” (161). Nevertheless, one finds in late fourteenth-century Spain an inquisitor prosecuting two theologians for their views on transubstantiation—views that were “perfectly orthodox in other parts of Europe” (Arnold 10). In other words, there were always exceptions to the transubtantiative “rule.” I say “feast-related” instead of “Corpus-Christi” processions because, according to Miri Rubin, the death of Urban IV diminished the Corpus Christi feast’s promotion until 1317, when it was reconfirmed by John XXII (Little 34). Only after 1317, apparently, was the feast “celebrated with processions and the carrying of the Blessed Sacrament in a monstrance” (Cruz 277). But even before 1317, it “continued to be spread by means of individual bishops, religious orders (including the Dominicans, with whom Dante would have been familiar), and personal contacts among bishops and laity” (Little 34–35). In 1319, in fact, two years before Dante’s death, the Franciscans became the first religious order legislatively “to stipulate the universal observance” of the Corpus Christi feast (Groeschel and Monti 126).

3

Flesh Corruptible: Dante’s Inferno

Tre, triune, Trinity: A numerological preamble The Comedy, quips Steven Botterill, “is a Heraclitean river, into which no reader can ever step twice and find it unaltered” (2). It is nevertheless a river with antecedents that aided Dante in engineering its course. Christian visions of heaven and hell were extraordinarily popular during the Middle Ages. More than sixty have survived into the present day, many of them in multiple manuscripts—not to mention, multiple languages (Gardiner xv). Several of these visions I shall comparatively reference as we proceed. But it is, of course, Dante’s vision which has been given a central position in the Western literary canon, and for well-deserved reason. Not only did he poetically reconcile the Thomistic fusion of Aristotelianism and Christian Platonism with “the mystical ideology of the cor gentile [gentle heart]” (Auerbach 71). He also managed to conceive a vision of a sweet (and sordid) hereafter that, not unlike Scholasticism, is so calculated, so structurally unified—even scientifically “noble” in its proportions, as Karl Vossler waxes (9). Who cannot but marvel at the poem’s spirographic geometry, its mathematically symmetrical architecture? But then, the Middle Ages were extraordinarily serious about numbers (Royal 37). If the beauty of the universe was to be unlocked by the medieval scholar, if a deeper symbolic order was to be given to it, numbers, which were “conceived as the essence of all things,” would be the key (18). In keeping with Pythagorean categories, 10 was envisioned as the perfect number—“lo perfetto numero,” as Dante states in Vita nuova xxix, 1 (qtd. in Hollander, Dante 30).1 For Dante, 10 recalled “God’s unity (10 = 1 + 0 = 1)” (Hollander, Dante 30). Nevertheless—and as all published introductions to Dante’s poem are swift to explicate—most fundamental to the Comedy is a triadic pattern. Dante’s is a cosmos created in and out of squares and cubes of the integer three, as well as in and out of that integer itself. Common literary wisdom informs us that the Comedy’s three canticles reflect the three realms

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of the afterlife—Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise—and comprise as a whole an introductory canto followed by 99 cantos, “thirty-three for each of the three realms, corresponding to the years of Christ’s life on earth, so that the number of all the cantos is a hundred, the number of the Whole” (Federn 271). Not only that: the entire poem operates on the basis of Dante’s own invented terza rima scheme, whereby the last word in each tercet—each tercet of 33 syllables, no less—rhymes with the last word in the third line of the next tercet (Dunbar 80). Thus, every discrete tercet of the poem is unified with the whole, like a perfectly woven chain mail or a great chain of being. Dante himself called it “concatenatio pulcra (‘beautiful linkage’)” (Reynolds 116). The mathematical proportioning hardly stops there. Even before penning his first verses of Inferno, Dante would have had to construct “many systematic charts, diagrams and word concordances,” which, to some extent, made the composition of his poetry possible (Hardt 83). Take, as a single example—and given its nature, only one may be necessary—the numerical control Dante exhibits in his handling of Beatrice: Not only is she mentioned by name sixty-three times in the Commedia (6 + 3 = 9) but her name is used as a rhyme word on nine occasions. She reappears to Dante in the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio … . Her first appearance in the canto dressed in the colours of faith, hope, and charity occurs earlier in lines 31–3. (Anderson 285)2

Manfred Hardt offers a colorful illustration of what Dante must have looked like while engaged in his rigorous numerological business—counting sheets of paper, “filling them with lines according to medieval writing habits” and “mark[ing] on the sheets in advance” (93). In fact, when Dante, the Poet, reaches his last piece of vellum intended for Purgatory, he takes a self-reflexive turn, writing into his poem how he has only a few verses left at his disposal, all “in order to complete the well-calculated number” of its 4655 verses (94). As Thomas Aquinas once said, and as Dante clearly concurred, “The senses delight in things duly proportioned” (qtd. in Reynolds 18). Perhaps Dante was also willingly submitting to Augustine’s dictum in the Confessions: “Shameful is the part that is not congruous to the whole” (qtd. in Beckwith 22). While today we may consider Pythagorean structure anathema to literary art, Dante, like his contemporaries, believed numerological symbolism to be essential to producing a work of art, as such symbolism “control[led] the relationship of [the artwork’s] parts to the whole” (Reynolds 18). There are other symmetries and correspondences that merit brief attention. All three canticles, for instance, display a conspicuous break at cantos ix–x,

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whereby a sort of prolonged prelude segues to “a new beginning, whether this be as a descent into Hell’s City of Dis or Purgatory’s circles of purification, or an ascent, as in the final celestial installment, out of the earth’s shadow and into the Sun” (Foster 121). Another clue to the Comedy’s structural logic, indeed to its obsessive dedication to positional correspondences, is conspicuously (and, arguably, most famously) evident in “the recurrence of the concept stelle ‘stars’ as the final word in each of the three canticles” (Hart, “Geometric” 102). But there is parallel structure even more complex, for as Christopher Kleinhenz observes, this is a poem that can be read not “only horizontally and linearly (that is, each canticle within itself),” but also vertically, that is, with “each canticle holding up foil-mirrors to the others” (“On Dante” 282). Kleinhenz suggests this design was borrowed from fresco cycles common at the time—such as those painted by Dante’s friend Giotto (282)—which could be read linearly as well as vertically. In the case of the Comedy each canticle’s sixth canto, for instance, “deals with politics of increasingly larger scope: Florence in the Inferno; Italy in the Purgatorio; and Empire in the Paradiso … The pilgrim’s encounter with Brunetto Latini in the Inferno 15 is complemented—and corrected—by the meeting with Cacciaguida in Paradiso 15,” and so forth (282). (If this seems tangential, I ask for the reader’s indulgence, as my aim, in the long run, is to show that the Comedy’s capacity to be read vertically justifies a Eucharistic reading of Dante’s vision of God in the final thirty-third—and also 100th— canto of the poem.) If Dante was a “symmetrical spirit” (Crespo 378)—or, alternatively, an “architectonic one” (Hollander, Dante 31)3—that symmetry was compositionally realized on multiple levels: phonetic, semantic, and also pictorial (Crespo 378). But such proportionality was not for mere proportion’s sake. Dante was working with a symbolic numerology whose power and meaning derived in large part from what was both doctrine and the mystery of the Christian faith: a belief in the Trinity—in the Father, and the Son (Incarnated as Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit—as three and yet as consubstantially one. Thus, for the medieval Christian believer, the Nicene Creed, through whose recitation participants professed their faith, as well as the Mass more broadly, were—and still are—endlessly reminiscent of “the threeness of the universe” (Dunbar 403). In the Kyrie eleison, for example, as H. Flanders Dunbar enumerates, mercy is implored three times in remembrance of the Trinity who forgives sins by virtue of the Incarnation, while the Gloria in excelsis suggests the peace which Christ brought at his birth to a world in which there were three enmities, that between God and man, that between angels and men, and that between man and

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Dante’s Sacred Poem man. This is reminiscent of the Tri-unity which gives structure to the universe, and of its threefold negation. (403)

In all likelihood, Dante, like other Christian writers of his time, was programmed “to perceive patterns of three throughout creation and to construct works according to a triple pattern” (Reynolds 18). Today the pursuit and discovery everywhere of evidences of the supreme Trinitarian attribute of the Deity may seem “comical abracadabra,” but in the Middle Ages, “numerical symbolism was … a serious and even sacred matter” (MacAllister 13). When therefore Dante aligns Beatrice with the number 63, as well as with other multiples or permutations of the number nine, his reasons for doing so are integrally—and skillfully—bound up with the Blessed Trinity. In fact, in his Vita nuova, Dante goes so far as to proclaim that Beatrice is the number nine: [I]f three is the sole factor of nine and if the sole factor of miracles is three, that is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who are three and one, so this lady was accompanied by the number nine in such wise that it may be understood that she was a nine, that is, a miracle, the root of which, that is, of the miracle, is the wondrous Trinity and nothing else—xxix, 3. (qtd. in Hollander, Dante 29–30)

So, while modern readers may be more at ease with mining Dante’s poem for its secular or classical elements, or with deconstructing its makeup,4 Charles Singleton resourcefully counsels that “[w]e shall be better readers of this poet’s work when we shall have learned to follow out the unfolding of its form as the fulfillment of a necessary pattern; a pattern by which a Christian poem has its meaning” (Dante Studies 1 59). Even Dante’s ingenious invention of the terza rima was for the sake of carrying “the praise of the Trinity right down into the individual lines of the poem” (Anderson 285). Of course, Dante also offers us intentional parodies of the Trinity, as in the three beasts at the Inferno’s opening and the three-headed Satan at its close. These do not operate merely as uncomplicated parodies, however; they also possess within their triune structure impressively material, but also immaterially concealed, allusions to the Eucharist, to that holy wafer considered to be the Real Presence and, ergo, the raison d’être of the Roman Catholic Church. In other words, the arithmetic in which Dante revels is always an auxiliary science, necessarily subordinate to his theological aim, which is to “integrate numbers into the text so that they represent sacred contents” (Hardt 92).5 It is perhaps that subordination which, notwithstanding Dante’s commitment to mathematical calculation, ultimately results in the non-mechanical character of his Comedy’s hundred cantos (Kleinhenz, “On Dante” 283). Reading Dante’s

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poem in the Middle Ages would have been much like reading the Bible, in the sense that readers (and writers) were predisposed to reading both literally and allegorically—to recognizing that a passage or story or image possessed multiple meanings. The inclination or expectation to read a text polysemically would have been familiar to churchgoers as well, even if the “lived” variety of such readings were less interpretively complex and, on occasion, less contorted. The cement binding the stones of a church altar, for example, was said to be “made of the lime of charity, the sand of social service, and the water of the spirit,” while the altar ceremonially represented the ark, the table of the Last Supper, the heart, and so on, there being the definite allegory of the corporate church, the trope in its application to the individual soul, and the anagoge in the relation to the heavenly intercession of Christ … [N]ot only [did] each accessory have its own independent appropriate signification according to the levels, but also it [was] given additional meanings appropriate to its relation to the course of the Mass … . Thus, for example, in relation to Christ the altar [was] sometimes the manger, sometimes Calvary, and sometimes the tomb. (Dunbar 403–404)

Even the Sign of the Cross, as Innocent III wrote in his Sacred Mystery of the Altar, “is made with three fingers, because it is imprinted under invocation of the Trinity … so that it descends from the upper part to the lower, and crosses over from the right hand to the left because Christ came down from the heaven to the Earth and crossed over from the Jews to the Gentiles” (qtd. in Emmons). One finds this rich and wide-spanning symbolism in medieval bestiaries as well. In one from the twelfth century, for example, the elephant is interpreted not only lexically (“a mountain is called ‘eliphio’ in Greek”), but also literally (“Elephants protect themselves with ivory tusks”) and allegorically in several ways (“Now the Elephant and his wife represent Adam and Eve … When the Big Elephant arrives, i.e. the Hebrew Law, and fails to lift up the fallen, it is the same as when the Pharisee failed … Our Lord Jesus Christ, although he was the greatest, was made the most Insignificant of All the Elephants”) (Book 25–27). As a rhetorical device, medieval allegory often commented on, or played off, the tension between accidents and substance (Rubin, Corpus 25)—tensions which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, lay at the heart of the period’s conceptual grappling with transubstantiation. To complicate matters, while Dante often reverently cites the Bible, he also freely modifies it, thus intentionally confusing the Bible’s status (Benfell 142). Indeed, it is sometimes “hard to know where the biblical world ends and Dante’s

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begins,” as V. Stanley Benfell intones, “or—to be more accurate—to know how Dante has reimagined and extended the Bible” because of his repeated disruptions of that text for his own poetic aims (142). In this way, Dante renders the Comedy doubly polyvalent,6 in the sense that anticipated interpretations are forced to collide in unanticipated fashion with necessary supplementary interpretations. But was Dante doing all this for purely poetic reasons? If Dante did write the epistle to Cangrande,7 in which his use of the fourfold theological interpretive method in the Comedy is laid out (see n.5, however), it was there that he explained, as Dunbar succinctly argues, that the poem was “to be interpreted at one and the same time on different levels so closely interrelated that each is corrected by the other and that all are blended into an harmonious whole” (xi). In other words, some meanings were to be rejected out of commitment to the “harmony of the whole” (xi). Osip Mandelstam once described the Comedy as a single crystal with more than 10,000 facets (Anderson 245), and although the particular reading of the Comedy upon which we are about to embark is but one facet of those thousands, it is nevertheless an important one—a very important one, I would even propose. For, the Eucharist singularly harmonizes the Christian whole and links, through the Incarnation and Christ’s sacrifice, humanity to God. By reading the Comedy Eucharistically, moreover, we will see that, although Christ nowhere appears as “an historical personage” (Vossler 212), he is indeed present in symbolically enthreed form—and not only in Paradise xxxiii or on the summit of Purgatory, but in inverted fashion throughout the Inferno. He is present in Hell through an absence of intrearsi, we might say (intrearsi being Dante’s neologism for “to enthree oneself ”), and through a repeated display of unharmonious dualism. But instead of rushing headlong into the deepest pit of Hell, let us make our way gradually through the Inferno, stopping along the way to muse, not unlike Dante himself, over the contents of his uncanny creation.

The holy midway If one agrees with Dunbar that the web of symbolism in Inferno and Purgatory finds its only solution in the final vision in Paradise (102), then we ought to be able—if transubstantiation’s centrality to the Comedy is credible as a thesis—to find Christological resonances at the outset of Dante’s poem. Indeed, we can. Dante’s pilgrimage through the afterlife not only begins at the (academically wellscrutinized) midway journey of his life—or, rather, of life in general as biblically

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determined8; it also significantly transpires during Holy Week. Few are unfamiliar with the poem’s opening lines: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/ché la diritta via era smarrita” (Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path (Inf. 1.1–3)). From these lines, we are able to infer that the Pilgrim finds himself in that dark wood on the evening of Thursday, April 7, 1300 (Musa 3), the night before Good Friday. And so, his eddying descent into Hell, his climb up the mountain of Purgatory, and his subsequent float into Paradise take place “through Good Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion, through Easter Sunday and the first few days of the week following” (Lewis 102). No wonder the frequency, thus, of references to the Easter liturgy which can be found across the entirety of Dante’s poem (Durling, “Canto xxx” 386). Significant for us at this juncture, however, is that, from the twelfth century onward, Holy Week signaled a special time particularly for Eucharistic devotion. In commemorating the Paschal Mystery, “people obviously wanted to be close to the living Christ,” explain Benedict Groeschel and James Monti (120); and so ceremonies—“some beautiful and some theologically awkward”—became increasingly popular (120). As a sample of the latter, Groeschel and Monti cite the ceremonial “entombment” on Good Friday of the Eucharist (120). According to a tenth-century biography of St. Ulrich (893–973), this burying of the reserved Eucharist was intended as a reenactment of Christ’s burial, and in a location which, much like the Holy Sepulcher, would be barricaded with a stone (198). And so, when that “most delectable day of Easter arrived,” as the biography recounts, St. Ulrich “entered the church of St. Ambrose after prime, where he had placed the Corpus Christi on Good Friday. … And there with a few clerks he celebrated the Mass of the Holy Trinity” (qtd. in Groeschel and Monti 198–199). This disposition of the Blessed Sacrament in a symbolic tomb on Good Friday and its ensuing “elevation” on Easter Sunday soon became a commonplace across much of medieval Europe and “in a way that was distinct from, although not divorced from, Mass and Holy Communion” (Groeschel and Monti 199). Given the precision of Dante’s temporal setting of his pilgrimage, it is not only possible but to some extent reasonable that his intentions were for the Comedy to resonate Eucharistically—coterminous, of course, with its doing so politically, personally, historically, et cetera. And if indeed it was the case that Dante was once under inquiry for heresy, as an early tradition alleges, or even if that tradition only emerged because of circulated rumors about the unorthodoxy of his beliefs (Reynolds 377), a paradigmatically sacramental structure to his poem would have nimbly certified his adherence to the Christian faith. More

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recent critics, it is true, lean toward reading Dante’s getting lost in the dark wood and wandering from the straight path as symbolic of his earlier devotion to radical Aristotelianism (Stone, “Dante” 135). In this view, the Comedy, following Thomas Aquinas, affirms philosophy’s value while also crucially “emphasizing its limits and insisting that the attainment that matters most of all, true felicity, lies beyond philosophy’s grasp” (135). As for where true felicity really lay: that would be in “the Christian faith, biblical revelation, and God’s grace” (135).9 Hence the significance (often commented upon by Dantists) of the Poet’s reference to being midway along the journey not of his life but of our life. That journey—and coeval derailment from the straight path—is not only the Pilgrim’s but correspondingly that of the entire Church.10 This same universalizing emphasis is generated by Dante’s employment of the passive voice in describing his having been lost (era smarrita), further suggesting the loss of that path not only to himself but to humankind more generally (Cassata 13). And so, this journey—our journey—recommends that it will, at its core, be relevant, and sacred, and beyond reproof to the entire Christian body. And that relevance, I would argue, is predicated on what lies at the core of Christian belief: Christ’s Incarnation and resurrection, his sacrifice and subsequent Real Presence in the Eucharist. Finding himself in a dark wood may well symbolize Dante’s personal engagement in Florentine politics, as Dunbar argues (40). Nevertheless, sun symbolism—or the express lack of it here, rather—also potentially speaks to the absence of the triune God. For, in the sun, as Dunbar herself avers, “with its three aspects of life-giving, light-giving, and heat-giving, had been found a principle of order which could give a consistent philosophical perspective to all other imagery that had been used of Deity” (40). While we may be a far remove in Canto I from that triune God, we may not be as far away from Christ as we imagine. While Christ’s life on earth may be typically foregrounded contemporarily—“the carpenter, the friend of fisher-folk, [Christ’s] healings and teachings on the mountains and lake-shores and plains of Galilee”—during the Middle Ages “the central fact of Christ’s life was his death” (67). In this sense, the Comedy opens much as did Christ’s terrestrial life: “He, Sun and Light, became obscured by the cloud of flesh, and came to human consciousness in the Dark Wood of humanity” (67, emphasis added). Consider Albertus Magnus’ thirteenth-century proclamation that “flesh [is] the cloud that hid the Sun” (qtd. in Dunbar 67). That the Cathars, who verbally anathemized Eucharistic presence, were themselves deeply imbued with a “contempt for the human body” (Wilson 95) may reflect a paradoxical parallel here. After all, the Comedy is rife

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with a similar contempt for the human body—or, at least, for the human body that can never be materially escaped. But that, I would insist, is in anticipation of the Resurrection, which is of course entirely necessary for Christ’s return as the sacramental Host. Christological resonance can be found, as well, in those first three lines of Inferno. As commentators beginning with Boccaccio have attested, they contain allusions to John 14:6: “I am the way and the truth and the life” (Cassell 6). Dante’s opening line—Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—pays lexical tribute to “the way” (cammin) and to life (vita), while his third pays more explicit tribute to the Vulgate’s way (via). Even more potent, given our interests, is that the reader who studies Jesus’s words in John’s Easter-story account will find them ironically glossed in the first sixty-one lines of Dante’s poem (Cassell 6). When Thomas in John’s gospel verbally seeks where Christ is going and how they, the apostles, will know the way, Christ replies, “No man cometh to the Father, but by me.” And so, in the first sixty-one lines of Inferno I, relates Anthony K. Cassell, Dante fails “because he is not following the way of Christ. Rather, in self-deception, he seeks to gain his vision of beatitude totally under his own powers; he does not realize that, by himself, he cannot even discern his true goal, let alone reach it, without the prevenient grace of the Redeemer” (6). Even further attention need be drawn to that first verse of Inferno, in terms of its disclosure that the Pilgrim’s journey is being made in imitatione Christi (Cassell 8). Dante’s age at the time of his pilgrimage-in-poetry is, after all, thirty-four, an age that “reflects as closely as possible the age of Christ himself at the Redemption as Dante calculated it” (8). Modern readers may find this surprising, considering the number’s divergence from current theological opinion regarding when Christ was put to death. But according to Cassell, who quarries his evidence from Dante’s Convivio, Dante preferred to keep closer to the biblical and Aristotelian traditions of the allotment of man’s years and his physical and mental growth and decline, generation, and corruption. Reading Psalm 15:10 in its traditional sense as a prediction of Christ’s death (‘Nec dabis sanctum tuum videre corruptionem’ [Nor wilt thou give thy holy one to see corruption]), Dante’s Convivio IV, 23 applies it theologically to Christ’s resurrection as recounted in Acts 2:27 and 31, 13:35 and 37 and dates the Redeemer’s death before human decline, that is, in his thirty-fourth year. (8)

Dante the Pilgrim, of course, tries to clamber up the hill that leads most directly to that “light of Divine Love” (Musa 5). Alas, he is famously forced back by three beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a ravenous she-wolf (who especially

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despairs Dante). While the earliest scholars conceived this feral triple-threat as an incarnation of “the major lusts, desires, or temptations of all men as identified in 1 John 2:16–17,”11 later interpreters would affiliate them with the corrupt and corrupting politics of Dante’s period,12 with those sins “most besetting the Florence of the time, pride, envy and lust”—as well as with man’s fall into sin more broadly (Cassell 145). We ought not to forget, however, that, when the Pilgrim’s path is obstructed, those three beasts force him back “to where the sun is mute” (Inf. I.60)—which is viably to say, back into a fleshimprisoned world antithetical to that of the risen Christ qua Eucharist. Given this decisively Christian allegorical framework, why is it Virgil, then— that ancient Roman writer of the Aeneid—who comes to itinerant Dante’s aid? Again, the answer can be partially gleaned if we resist believing that we are remote from Christ as a presence—even if that presence is allusive, indirect, and possibly inverted (this is Hell, after all). Virgil, who was indisputably a favorite poet of Dante’s and also epitomized for him the voice of Reason (Leigh 39), was also believed in the Middle Ages to have prophesied Christ’s coming (Ruggiers 139). This shadowy figure whom Dante places in his dark wooded valley is not, in other words, the Virgil we know from classical sources. This is the Virgil who, since as early as the fourth century, was believed to have foretold in his fourth eclogue the birth of a child who would establish “a new age of gold” (Reynolds 108). For Dante and his contemporaries Virgil was the essential link between the pagan past and the Catholic present, “between the dei falsi e bugiardi (‘lying and false gods’) and the true God of the Christians” (108). If we are predisposed to a Christological interpretation of the Inferno’s point of departure—and certainly the above allusions to Holy Week and to Virgil as the emissary of Christ’s imminent arrival recommend that there is reason to be—then, as good medieval readers of the Comedy, we ought to anticipate even at this early juncture that, by the poem’s end, we will encounter Christ, whether in the form (or some form other than that) of the incarnated Christ. At the end of Canto ii, Dante willingly follows his classical muse along the “deep and rugged road” that descends into Hell’s vestibule. We might propose that this joining of forces between pagan past and Christian present shall, through the poets’ forging of wills—“Let us start, for both our wills, joined now, are one,” says Dante to Virgil (l. 139)—initiate Dante’s road to “success” and to a reclamation of his Christian self. For here, the forging is decisively of wills and, so, one quite distinct from the beastly image of two souls forged “in one flesh” (Gen. 2:24) (qtd. in Raffa, Divine 45), a beastly image to which Dante will soon recursively expose us.

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The monstrously mutable, nonevacuable body In spite of their existence as shades, those who inhabit Hell’s dark, sub-terrestrial domain are simultaneously chained to their existence as fleshy matter. In fact, the deeper Virgil will escort his guest into the abyss, the heavier those sinners’ flesh-bound chains will become—gravitationally and gustatorily speaking. If the memorable pair of Paolo and Francesca who reside in the Second Circle of Hell, adjacent to Limbo, whirl about in an infernal wind, it is because their iniquities are less grave than those of their lower-living neighbors, woefully lodged in exponentially denser and more deleterious homes. These latter folks will reside in swamp and muck, in crypts and dark chutes, in liquid fire or immobilizing ice. As for Paolo and Francesca, much has been made of their romance—spurred, quite literally, by their reading of a romance. Aroused by Lancelot’s adulterous adventures, wife and brother-in-law, in short, yield to their own. But even they who are buffeted by relatively painless gusts are forced to endure a bodily existence—in this case in the form of an eternal companionship that is nasty and brutish, and not fortunate in the least. Amor, passionate love, may have joined Paolo and Francesca as one in life, but now “Paolo’s shade will be with her always (‘mai da me non fia diviso’ [shall never be parted from me (5.135]) [and] … it is the non-division—the ‘mai … diviso’—forever holding the infernal couple together that indicates devastation” (Raffa, Divine 45). Indeed, Dante, in his Inferno, is continuously foregrounding couples—either because the two individuals committed their sins together or because they performed comparable sins during their independent lives. Could this intentional deployment of couples throughout the Inferno be Dante’s modus operandi of differentiating the flesh that feeds on the body from the flesh—or Flesh, rather—that feeds the soul? Whereas the latter, as we shall see, calls for a release from the physical, incarnated body, the former entails a physical body-ness in, and to, which one is held captive. In the case of Paolo and Francesca, then, what we witness, as Guy P. Raffa shrewdly points out, is “an incarnation in the carnal sense of the term” (Divine 45).13 This form of flesh—sinfully reveled in, subject to decay and death, to stinking and rotting—is in unqualified contradistinction to the pure flesh identified with that “sacred food and supersubstantial bread” (as Thomas Aquinas described in a sermon written for Maundy Thursday). Indeed, it is worth our inspecting the entire sentence from which that description comes; for if one is amenable to reading the Comedy through a Eucharistic lens, that sentence conceivably operate as a distilled version of—as an essence of, even—Dante’s overarching poetic pilgrimage: “You

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have in this sacred food and supersubstantial bread wonderfully found a means and the way for those who became ill by eating of the forbidden tree”—a tree we shall encounter in Purgatory—“and lost thereby the unfading and imperishable crown of everlasting glory to be healed through eating the spotless, pure Lamb” (qtd. in Gaudoin-Parker 99). Even earlier, in the third century, we find Tertullian drawing orthodox attention in his commentary on the Lukan parable of the Prodigal Son to the purity of the flesh upon which the soul feasts: [The son] seals the covenant of faith and thus afterwards feeds on the rich food [lit. “fatness,” i.e., “fatted calf ”] of the Lord’s body, that is, on the Eucharist. The flesh is the hinge of salvation … The flesh feeds on the body and blood of Christ that the soul also may feast [lit. “be fattened”] on God. (qtd. in Gaudoin-Parker 27)

Feeding on the fatted calf that is the Lord’s body is as antithetical as one can get to the appetites that Dante’s Hell-housed individuals satisfied in life. Inferno’s sinners feasted, or were fattened, on more carnal foods: lust, gluttony, simony, alchemy—and, of course, heresy. Could it be only accident, then, that, in the sixth circle of Hell in which Dante and Virgil encounter the Heretics (not to mention, a stench that is, quite literally, ungodly), we find an iconography that intentionally plays on—or, rather, against—the Eucharist? In Canto x, in particular, Dante meets up with the followers of Epicurus who possessed a purely materialist (and, hence, heretical) vision of human existence. Among them is Farinata, who, along with his wife, was condemned in 1283, the year Dante turned eighteen. The posthumous charge by Florence’s Franciscan inquisitor, Fra Salomone da Lucca, had labeled them “Paterini,” which is to say, “adherents to the heresy of the Cathars” (Durling, “Canto x” 137). Allusions in Canto x to the death and resurrection of Christ appear not only in Farinata’s speech,14 but also in the image projected of Farinata as standing “erect and visible from the waist up” (Durling, “Canto x” 147). His positioning echoes the iconographic motif of the the imago pietatis, the Man of Sorrows, which “represents the dead Christ from the waist up, with his head bent and his hands crossed in front of him” (147). Intriguingly, this motif gained particular scrutiny around 1300, notes Robert Durling, “thanks in part to its prominence in the observances of the Jubilee in Rome” (“Farinata” 11). (Dante is believed to have attended that Jubilee.) This imago pietatis is not, as some might initially presume, a representation of the dead Christ upon deposition from the cross, however. As many commentators have suggested, Ewald Vetter most conclusively among

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them, the imago pietatis was decidedly Eucharistic in its symbolism—nothing less than, in Durling’s words again, “the Body of Christ as it was believed to be present in the consecrated host of the Mass” and “hidden under the appearance of the bread” (“Canto x” 147). If it really was a motif popularly associated with Western medieval practices of Eucharistic veneration (“Farinata” 31), then that Dante might be playing with it here is completely tenable. After all, the doctrine of transubstantiation and, later, the Corpus Christi feast were considered to be viable, essential weapons in combatting heresy (“Canto x” 148). The heretic’s “proud adherence to his own errors” set him quite against the Eucharistic bond of love in which the Church was united (148).15 The connection is further fortified when, in Canto xi, the Pilgrim peers beneath the lid of the tomb of Pope Anastasius ii. Dante describes Anastasius as the pope whom Photinus had lured away from la via dritta, “the straight path” (Inf. xi.9). The feasibility of the straight path as implying the proper Christian path should not be overlooked, and not only because of its patent echo of Inferno’s opening tercet. As important is that Anastasius II, who served as pope from 496 to 498, was for centuries believed to have permitted Photinus, a deacon of Thessalonica who followed the heresy of Acacius, to receive communion (Musa 56). Can it be only by virtue—or vice—of accident that so many of the raisons d’être for those punishments in Hell obliquely orbit the Eucharist?

Flesh and blood—and guts If I have hastened through the first third of the Inferno, hardly stopping to inspect the variegated sentences imposed upon each of its levels’ inhabitants, I have done so only because the flesh- and Flesh-related tropes are most vivid in the latter half of the canticle. Indeed, at the beginning of Canto xvii—the halfway mark between the Inferno’s thirty-four cantos—Geryon (part man, part clawed scorpion) flies Dante and Virgil down to the Eighth Circle of Hell, which is composed of ten Malebolge, or Evil Pockets. Geryon’s airlift, ironically enough, ushers the two poets into a territory where flight is virtually impossible. But before we get there, it is worth our musing over one of the intriguing doublenatured beasts earlier encountered amidst those lifeless landscapes of boiling blood, sere woods, and burning sand. Here, I am speaking of the Minotaur, that “infamy of Crete,” that “son conceived in a pretended cow” (Inf. xii.12–13), who presides over the Violent in the Seventh Circle. This creature of such mangled conception—very possibly a parodic inversion of Christ’s conception—goes

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“crazy with the fever of his rage,” even biting into his flesh when he sees Dante and Virgil (ll. 14–15). Beastly, fleshly, biting, three-faced creatures; imperfect, non-hypostatic, two-natured beasts: the Inferno from hereon is rife with them, and one cannot help speculate that they are fundamental inversions of the being of Christ—as both man and also something other than man; as both human in nature and also divine. That hypostatic union, incidentally, had been made dogma in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon. The formulary drawn up by the council proclaimed that the One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, [is] made known in two natures [which exist] without confusion, without change, without division, without separation … the properties of each being preserved, and [both] concurring into one Person (prosopon) and one hypostasis—not parted or divided into two Persons (prosopa) but one and the same Son and Only-begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ … (qtd. in Bokenkotter 84)

To propose that Dante’s monstrous, double-natured creatures are the direct converse of “the same Son and Only-begotten” seems, thus, hardly a leap. One might even assert the same of the increasingly metamorphosing humans whom we shall meet deeper down in Hell and who are forced into endless mergers with snakes and trees and other biblically and classically resonant creatures. These amalgamations, quite unlike the two-natured Christ, are forever confused, forever changing, eternally separating, and never adequately or indivisibly one and the same. Dante the Poet, in fact, often has Virgil positioned so that the Pilgrim’s attention is drawn to this pitiful double-natured-ness: “And my good guide, now standing by the torso at the point the beast’s two natures joined … ” (Inf. xii.84) describes Virgil in physical relation to the centaur Chiron. (Note, too, the perverted echo here of the waist-up imago pietatis, given the location of where this centaur’s two natures presumably join.) Further on, we encounter the Harpies, those human-faced and -necked birds that rend the very suicide-trees in which they nest (Raffa, Divine 38). And what of those suicide-trees themselves, which, while dry and thorny, cry out and bleed at being manhandled? “I snapped the tiny branch of a great thornbush,” declares our Poet, And its trunk cried: “Why are you tearing me?” And when its blood turned dark around the wound, it started saying more: “Why do you rip me? Have you no sense of pity whatsoever? Men were we once, now we are changed to scrub; but even if we had been souls of serpents, your hand should have shown more pity than it did.” (Inf. xiii.32–37)

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And then there is, once more, the Minotaur, that monster part man and part bull, which, as depicted in Ovid’s Art of Love, “feeds on human flesh” (Russo 168). (Hence, the classical need to keep him caged, with annual tributes of maidens and men brought to his labyrinthine prison for eating.) True, such two-natured creatures are ancient Greek and Roman in their texture and source. In the case of the suicide-trees, for instance, Dante is drawing unquestionably on Virgil’s Aeneid, where the shrub from which Aeneas breaks off a branch “begins to pour forth blood; at the same time a voice issues from the ground beneath the shrub where Polydorus is buried” (Musa 69). Even so, Dante’s sere and suffering trees, much like the other beings and beasts positioned in Hell—including those we have already met and those we are about to encounter—are all imbued with a symbolic resonance that is firmly Christian. As Raffa laudably discerns, in this hellish place where Christ’s name is never uttered,16 his presence is nevertheless definitely “marked in malo,” which is to say, in the wrong; and this is accomplished via a series of guardians and tormentors whose hybridity mocks the incarnational union of humanity and the divine … . As both doubles and halves, the poet’s infernal hybrids lay the groundwork for a composite parody of the Incarnation through their complementary perversions of the union of two complete natures in a single person. (Raffa, Divine 38–39)

In the case of the forlorn humans who are trapped inside those barbed trees, there is a double resonance. These humans are merged with their crucifixes, we might posit, such that they cannot descend, like Christ, from their method of punishment. Such imagery is thus semantically infused with what Christ can, and will, and will not do—even if he himself must remain un-named in Hell. In this sense, we are presented with an evocatively prickly allusion to a post-Edenic Eden. The desiccated tree and explicit reference to the “souls of serpents” provide an inversion of the fruit-bearing tree that certifies a future Eucharistic presence. Christ as capable of descending from his method of punishment—and thereby of rising, and, in that way, of returning to humanity in his sacramental form—marks the attainable fruit (and Flesh). Unlike Hell’s paradoxically flesh-ridden shades, Christ can never, as Thomistic theology teaches, be torn or ripped or even divided. The key to this hermeneutical reading (should one still be skeptical of its puissance) is in how Dante modifies Virgil’s original. Dante has placed his sinner in—and as—the trunk of the tree instead of underneath it, and he refers to a Suicide as a “spirito incarcerata” (Inf. xiii.87), an imprisoned

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spirit (Jacoff, “Body” 127–128). Further, the blood “turn[ing] dark around the wound” seems highly suggestive of the Eucharistic miracles pervasive throughout the thirteenth century. Dante’s twig-snapping produces a circle contoured in blood, after all—a bleeding circumference. Compare this to the miracle that took place on the Easter Sunday of 1171, in Ferrara, Italy, when, at that moment when Padre Pietro de Verona broke the consecrated Host into two parts, “all those present were startled to see a stream of blood spurting from it” (Cruz 22). The blood’s movement was “so violent and abundant,” in fact, that it sprinkled a semi-circular vault that was situated slightly behind and above the altar. Not only did the witnesses see blood, they also saw that the Host had turned to flesh” (22). An even more ancient miracle, from the eighth century, involves a priest-monk belonging to a monastery in Lanciano, Italy, who, despite being “versed in the sciences of the world,” as an ancient document reports, was “ignorant in that of God” (qtd. in Cruz 3). But whatever doubts he had about transubstantiation evaporated when, upon speaking the words of consecration while celebrating Mass, “the host was suddenly changed into a circle of flesh” (Cruz 3). While some modern readers may want to dismiss such miracles as mere eccentricities that bear little on Dante’s poem, Fitzpatrick sagely stresses how fertile the Middle Ages were with such visions: “St. Dominic saw Christ’s blood pouring into the chalice at Mass, nuns saw an infant appear” (223). Indeed, such apparitions were eventually to receive “embodiment in the art-form known as ‘the mystic wine-press,’” in which Christ’s blood is depicted as “being tapped into barrels” (223). In Dante’s realm of the Suicides, conversely, any sort of bodily materialization is creatively transformed into an “Ovidian negative metamorphosis”—whereby the flesh is incarcerated rather than incarnated (Jacoff, “Body” 127–128).17 So, even as Dante borrows from Ovid—the centaurs, the Minotaur, and, in not too long, the incestuous Myrrha—each of Dante’s tales, even down to specific gestures and words, is implicitly layered with Christian meaning. In this way, Dante’s intertextual borrowing continuously, if quietly, heralds the exquisitely positive and very non-Ovidian conversion that he will lovingly expose in Paradise. Dante as a Christian poet, in Madison Sowell’s graceful averring, seizes “any image—whether lancia [lance] or uccello [bird], inanimate or animate, noble or vulgar—and recontextualize[s], re-present[s], and metamorphose[s] it into something else” (11). Canto xvii, the halfway mark of the Inferno, is somewhat fittingly “like a busy railroad station, where a number of tracks end and new ones originate” (Cherchi 225). Here, we meet pointy-tailed Geryon, that beast with a “face of any honest man” but a serpentine body, minus two clawed paws that are “hairy to the

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armpits” (xvii.10–13). This man-cum-snake-cum-scorpion-cum-rodent acts as a transport plane for Dante and Virgil, who straddle his back for descent into the lower bowels of Hell. Flight becomes evermore a paradox, as earlier I suggested, given the increasingly immobilizing weight bearing down on this region’s inhabitants—by way of tarns of shit, cloaks of lead, confining ice, even one’s own entrails which require transporting by hand. The monstrous hybridizing of dissimilar natures grow denser and more complex; in fact, according to Cherchi, “Geryon, who incorporates two natures and three animal species, brings to a climax the theme of monstrosity … . Geryon’s triune nature reminds us of Cerberus’s three heads, but it also looks forward to the three giants who guard Cocytus, and the three-headed Lucifer” (225–226). What it also helplessly points to, one need argue, is the Trinity—or, rather, to an intentionally twisted play with that trine union. Dante’s conflation of details from classical mythology with those from medieval bestiaries that “tell of monsters having three natures” (230) is doubtlessly to complicate, intensify, and thus suggestively amplify his increasingly Trinity-oriented—or rather, here, Trinity-disoriented—theme.18 Perhaps that is why none of the models for Dante’s Geryon coincide precisely with the creature as it appears in medieval paintings and miniatures (230). If this demonic figure is original, a veritable figment of Dante’s imagination (230), that may be because of the role Geryon is playing in inaugurating an incremental escalation of fraudulent triunes: of admixed natures that deceptively mimic and falsify the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as well as to transubstantiation—and, of course, to Christ’s incarnational journey, which necessarily precedes these. In fact, could Geryon’s silent flight be parodying Christ’s silent Resurrection? We might suggest, moreover, that Geryon functions as a kind of metaphorical midway point, given that we are about to descend from the degenerate demesne of the first half of the canticle, rife with Ovidian beasts—both animal and mythological—to the second half, with its intensifying shift toward bestial humans—monstrous, vicious, but also increasingly historical. In a direct inversion of Geryon’s flight, for example, we find those simonizing popes responsible for tearing the “Lovely Lady” of the Church asunder (Inf. xix.57). They are stuffed up to their calves—upside down, no less—in holes that resemble baptism fonts. These are punitive measures for their having perverted the Church by selling the Church—which is to say, its sacraments and ecclesiastical offices (Musa 101–102). Cunningly, Dante manages to insert into this episode a pope who was still alive in 1300: Boniface viii, Dante’s archenemy who was partly accountable for Dante’s exile from Florence. But this bolgia of sinners who are holed in with their feet aflame—and forced down, as

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if through a pneumatic tube, by newly arriving Simonists—is hardly dedicated exclusively to simony “in the technical sense” (Foster 101). This pockmarked pocket also speaks to a spiritual distortion more deeply evil, given that the Church, by her very nature, is supposed to aspire toward an end beyond this present world—toward Christ risen from the dead and in his glory (101). Yet, these churchmen, as Kenelm Foster notes, lived solely for mortal, temporal ends, thereby making “a substitution of what the Bride of Christ is for by what she precisely is not for” (100–101). In this way, Dante shrewdly crafts a 180-degree reversal of the sacrament which, in Thomistic terms, is a sign to be given freely because it is a vehicle of grace (101). The fondness for all things fraudulent continues in Canto xxiii, where the Hypocrites quite literally shoulder leaden weights (their cloaks are lined with them). Meanwhile, Caiaphas, who “advised the Pharisees it was expedient to sacrifice one man for all the people” (Inf. xxiii.116–117)—that man being Christ—lies in a cruciform stretch, his body interminably treaded upon by those weight-bearers. And so here, once again, is the resurrection motif— or anti-resurrection motif, more accurately—given that these sinners are incapable of liberating themselves from the physical weight hoisted upon them. This theme is even more imaginatively (and insidiously) illustrated in the ensuing canto, where snakes “push their tails and heads around the loins” of Thieves, before coiling themselves in knots around the sinners’ fronts (Inf. xxiv.95–96). The Thieves’ bolgia is indeed a most memorable locus of Dante’s “grotesque expressionistic sublime,” to borrow from Anthony Oldcorn (“Canto xxv” 337). It is additionally the locus of a barefaced parodic reversal of Christ’s resurrection. For, here the Pilgrim comes face-to-face with the thief Vanni Fucci who, thanks to snakebite, as the Poet recounts, flared up and burned, and turned into a heap of crumbled ash; and then, these ashes scattered on the ground began to come together on their own and quickly take the form they had before: precisely so, philosophers declare, the phoenix dies to be reborn again … (Inf. xxiv.101–108)

As Joan Ferrante observes, the one set of rhyme-words complete within this phoenix passage—“rinasce, pasce, fasce (107–111), that is, birth, life (feeding), and death (winding sheets)—reminds us of the primary symbolism of the phoenix in Christian tradition, the resurrection of Christ and of the human soul after death” (325). Consider, further, Vanni’s sin, which has warranted him this place in Hell: “I am stuck so far down here,” he concedes to the inquisitive Pilgrim, “because of theft: I stole the treasure of the sacristy” (Inf. xxiv.137–138). In other words, he

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stole the very vessels intended for the Eucharist and wine. (His was a crime also “falsely attributed to another” (Inf. xxiv.39).) Subsequent to his colloquy with Dante, Vanni is squeezed into rigor by those coiling snakes—though not without first gesturing a haughty “Fuck you!” to God. In this sense, that quintessentially lapsarian beast, the serpent, prevents Vanni from ever being able to rise or resurrect, to participate in any sort of exodus (which the sinners in Purgatory will be doing in droves). Although Vanni’s assault may appear asphyxiating, two other thieves, Cianfa and the historically unspecifiable Agnèl, have it far worse. They become coalescent with their garrotting beasts—or, to be more precise, Cianfa becomes the serpentine beast that then attacks Agnèl, with the pair of them, in due course, hideously combining. As Dante describes, serpent and sinner melt together “like hot wax” (Inf. xxv.61), with their two heads already fused to one and features from each flowed and blended into one face where two were lost in one another; two arms of each were four blurred strips of flesh; and thighs with legs, then stomach and the chest sprouted limbs that human eyes have never seen. (Inf. xxv.70–75)

Agnèl’s nightmarish fusion of self with snake causes his fellow thieves to cry out: “Oh Agnèl! If you could see how you are changing! You’re not yourself, and you’re not both of you!” (Inf. xxv.68–69). Given that Agnèl means literally “Lamb” in Italian, the allusion is tenably less than subtle. Here we have a changing Lamb, though it is not the Lamb of God, and, so, cannot be—as the Lamb of God can be—itself and also both its selves. Could this help to illumine why this twenty-fifth canto “contains more than twice as many lexical terms referring to parts of the human body than any other single canto in the Inferno” (Oldcorn, “Canto xxv” 334)? And yet, Dante wants somewhat urgently to stress that the portrait of deformity his Pilgrim witnesses is altogether distinct from that of any literary forebears. Dante outright declares with an element of pride—or theological warning, perhaps—that this is a portrait that would not only silence Lucan19 but turn Ovid envious, “for never did [Ovid] interchange two beings face to face so that both forms were ready to exchange their substance, each one for the other’s, an interchange of perfect symmetry” (Inf. xxv.97–103). Unlike that of his classical counterparts, Dante’s mode of doubling “results not in an incarnational union of sameness and difference but in a hideous, unidentifiable creature” (Raffa, Divine 43); or, to take from Dante directly, “the perverse image seemed both and neither” (qtd. in Raffa, Divine 77–78). In this sense, what Dante witnesses, in Oldcorn’s gloss, is a “mutual transformation of two individuals,”

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such that what changes is “not merely the external form or disposition of their matter (the Scholastic ‘act’), but the ‘matter’ itself ” (“Canto xxv” 341). This exchange of substances, this surreal fusing of existences into something simultaneously “both and neither,” sounds something of a clarion call when one takes into account the nature of transubstantiation. Instead of a holy, consecrated, theologically validated exchange of forms—as of bread into the Bread of Life and Christ’s eternal Body—here we have an exchange that is foul and bestial, a human symmetrically interchanged with “a little serpent, fiery with rage and black as a peppercorn” (Inf. xxv.83–84). While Guy Raffa takes this exchange of selves to be “an even clearer example of what the Incarnation is not” (Divine 43), I must go one step further: not only are we dealing with what the Incarnation is not, but, more acutely, with what transubstantiation is not. At present, such an assertion may seem extreme and unsubstantiated; but I suspect that the motif soon to achieve supremacy in Hell—that of cannibalism—will persuade the still-skeptical reader that something more is at stake. This “something” is contingent no less on a Christian belief in the Incarnation than in Christ’s resurrection, as it is the latter which enables Christians, through the Eucharist, to experience God’s living presence and to be transformed (quite literally) into the Body of Christ. Intriguingly, Oldcorn alleges that the “reproductively incompatible” coupling of Cianfa and Agnèl is “a monstrous parody of fecundation, or rather a failure to fecundate,”20 with their taboo union ending in a “final parodic transubstantiation” (“Canto xxv” 338). When Dante mentions the umbilicus—“the part where we first take our nourishment” (Inf. xxv.86)—this, says Oldcorn, initiates the simulation of “a monstrous de-gestation, a de-formation or unbirthing. The word ‘transubstantiation’ has of course a precise theological meaning,” he swiftly counsels his readers, avowing that it is being used here only ironically (“Canto xxv” 338–339). While Oldcorn may not theorize a more paradigmatic relationship of transubstantiation to the Comedy, his detection of transubstantiation’s saliency to this canto is shrewd—and helpful, certainly, to the present argument. For, what he contends is that the Cianfa-Agnèl coupling offers us, in short, a “symbolic unbecoming” (339). That coupling is also, we might add, a catechistic counter to, or miraculous inverse of, the transubstantiative becoming that the Pilgrim will witness in Paradise. Perhaps, at this point, I should defer to Dante’s Letter to Cangrande—even if only for rhetorically selfish purposes (given that earlier I acknowledged my uncertainty regarding its authorship). Dante the Correspondent warns there that, for any reader who attends only to the “half ” of his Comedy—i.e., only to its surface meaning—that work’s “‘double’ [can] not be understood” (qtd. in Raffa, Divine 44–45).21

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Dante’s burlesque dance with double natures, crucifixion, resurrection, the Trinity and transubstantiation irrefutably picks up its pace from this point onward. If, earlier on, couples like Francesca and Paolo were wedded together in a kind of tortuous companionship, now, they are so with increasing literalism. Consider the famous shade of Ulysses and his comrade-in-arms, Diomed, who exert a pull on Dante’s attention in the eighth bolgia of the Deceivers: “Who’s in that flame with its tip split in two … ?” the Pilgrim asks Virgil (Inf. xxvi.52)—to which Virgil replies: “Within, Ulysses and Diomed are suffering in anger with each other, just vengeance makes them march together now” (55–59). And what is the crime warranting this fierily conjoint—and yet paradoxically split— union? Not unlike Adam who ate the forbidden fruit, Ulysses defied his gods by sailing past the Pillars of Hercules (which Hercules had erected precisely to warn travelers not to cross). In Dante’s under-universe, Ulysses and Diomed are presented as having illicitly entered the narrow pass in pursuit of “a mountain shape, darkened by distance, that arose to endless heights” (Inf. xxvi.133–134)— Mount Purgatory, in other words. But that cozening attempt to reach beyond the limits to which humans have been divinely consigned can, in Dante’s theological conception of things, lead only and unavoidably to their demise. Particularly fascinating is that this account of Ulysses voyaging into forbidden waters—and getting fatally sucked beneath them “as pleased Another’s will” (Inf. xxvi.141)—has no literary precedent. It is, as Musa discloses, entirely Dante’s invention (142). Obviously, then, Dante is using history—as so often he does—in lieu of serving it.22 And what ultimately is he saying through this creative manipulation? Perhaps he wants, as Stephen Little argues, to underscore his Pilgrim’s need to learn how to recognize and read the afterlife’s signs “in light of the Incarnation” (148). The Pilgrim needs to discern, as do we readers, that Ulysses and Diomed’s strange suttee-like expiry as “two persons in one physical instantiation of the nature of fire” is a perversion of the two natures-in-one that is Christ Incarnate (148). Of course the reason these sinners are where they are, infernally speaking, is because they themselves did not read the signs. And if such signs are becoming increasingly inversely incarnational, and also more numerous, then the motifs about to dominate the last seven cantos—of fathers and sons; of falsifications of the flesh; of cannibalism and other such travestying plays on the Passion, the Trinity, and transubstantiation—should more critically signal to us that they require discernment. After all, as Little points out, how one interprets a sign “can determine one’s eternal fate” (149). Hence Dante’s banishment of Ulysses to Hell, as that seafaring Hellene attempted to reach Mount Purgatory by way of circumventing God. In Dante’s worldview, at least as presented in his poem,

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la via dritta, the straight path, is the only conceivable way to the Father—and that way, as Christ proclaims in John 14:16, is exclusively “through me.”

Fathers, sons—and the missing Holy Spirit Condemned alongside Ulysses to the eighth bolgia is Guido da Montefeltro, who counseled Pope Boniface viii not only on how to “level Palestrina to the ground” (Inf. xxvii.102) but the Colonna family along with it. For the purpose of doing so, the pope launched a crusade. Guido’s sin—which is paradoxically his mistaken and unrepentant trust in the pope’s fraudulent absolution of his sin—therefore places us squarely in what Jennifer Petrie describes as “a world in which appearances cannot be trusted” (367). After all, Pope Boniface viii’s absolution constitutes Guido’s condemnation. And yet, the same must be said of the Eucharist (equally paradoxically, perhaps). That is, the consecrated wafer elevated high above the altar is not the wheaten wafer the Christian believer sees raised above the altar. Such a pure, incorruptible believing that is not based on simple seeing certainly complicates the Dantean picture; but it does so in a manner that ultimately stresses what might otherwise appear erroneously “trustworthy” on the surface of the Comedy. As an ironic counterpoint to this anti-materialist claim, when we get to the ninth bolgia, with its endlessly circling procession of the Sowers of Discord, the punishments are evermore externalized: as disemboweled flesh, and flesh hacked, and flesh divided, and, finally, flesh loutishly chewed and ingested—forever and ever. True, we will have already encountered flesh-eaters by this point. In fact, Canto xii’s human-devouring Minotaur will have already been sharing and augmenting the flesh-eating traits of several beasts who came before him: teeth-gnashing Minos, who resides on the edge of the second circle (v, 4); and Plutus, “the ‘cursed wolf,’ on the margin of the fourth circle, [whose] rage feeds on itself (vii, 8–9) as he hears the stern words of Virgil” (Russo 169). The Minotaur was more crudely realistic than these precursors, however, what with his flesh-grating fury turned devastatingly on himself. Now, though, the escalation of crudeness becomes far more frightening. The Minotaur isn’t fully human, after all—as are the sinners we find in this ninth pocket, who must endure a violence that becomes progressively cruder and indelicately bodily. Mohammed, whom Dante believed to have initiated a great schism between the Church and Islam (Musa 152), appears here ripped open, clear “from his chin to where we fart,” such that his guts spill out alongside his “heart and other vital parts, [including] the dirty sack that turns shit to whatever

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the mouth gulps down” (Inf. xxviii.23–27). Curio, whose overly quick tongue precipitated the Roman Civil War, now has his tongue “hacked off as far down as the throat” (Inf. xxviii.101). And Mosca, who triggered the Florentine feud between Guelphs and Ghibellines, has his hands amputated, so that when he raises his “gory stumps in the filthy air … the blood drip[s] down and smear[s] his face” (Inf. xxviii.104–105). To accent the hideousness of these lacerated sights, Dante renders his language increasingly coarse: earthy and churlish, bloody and obscene. To be sure, such vernacular is incompatible with the language in which the Host would be discussed. But, then, here, flesh is in a state in which Christ’s Flesh would never find itself—even as the consecrated bread was being chewed, ripped apart, and champed between the teeth. A Eucharistic reading of the punishments endured by these Schismatics is hardly the only reading applicable to this canto and, conceivably, not even the most significant one. After all, Mohammed, Curio, and the lot of them are considered schismatics because of their attempts to “sever the body of political institutions—the Church, the state”; and so all Dante’s efforts in this canto—his selection of characters, the ways he stages them—are directed toward making a decidedly political statement (Barolini 85, 96). Nevertheless, we need not turn a blind eye to scholars who have glimpsed something incarnationally relevant beneath this canto’s grisly surface. Raffa, for one, suggests that the literally riven bodies in this bloody pocket of Hell “parody the simultaneous unity and duality of the Incarnation”; and nowhere “in the entire Inferno is this parodic gesture more vivid,” he says, than in Dante’s description of Bertrand de Born (Divine 65). That Provençal poet, the final mutilated shade whom Dante encounters amongst the other maimed, pierced, and limb-lopped Sowers of Scandal, provides what is arguably the Inferno’s most vivid image of punitive endurance. For Dante encounters less Bertran de Born than Bertran de Born’s headless trunk holding his own severed head by its hair and “swinging it in one hand just like a lantern,” as if the decapitated thing were giving off light (Inf. xxviii.122). “Alas!” Dante exclaims. “Of his own self [Bertran] made himself a light and they were two in one and one in two. How could this be? He who ordained it knows” (124–126). Could we ask for better proof of parody’s capacity to make one shudder? But such parody is not—or, at least, not only—engendered by these men being trapped in an endless Wheel of Misfortune, whereby they “heal only to be split again,” in Thomas Peterson’s evocation (375). This “due in uno” (two in one) and “uno in due” (one in two) likewise reverberates with the appropriately ineffable double-naturedness of the Incarnation. As such, it looks forward (in the direction-oriented sense) to a Eucharistic symbolism that expresses Trinitarian

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union, given that Christ’s double-naturedness becomes accessible to humanity in the form of the transubstantiated host. This canto, on the other hand, depicts a hellhole that can house only broken ones and twos, or masquerades of three— never an incorruptible, immutable, integral one as three. Perhaps, thus, we need to probe this ninth bolgia more “transubstantiatively.” At the least, we might draw attention to one of the motifs whose augmentation from this point on seems far too emphatic for it not to be pertinent: fathers and their relationships with their sons.23 We might begin with Bertrand de Born’s crime, the one responsible for his now having to carry his own head as if it were some aberrant saint’s attribute. “[K]now that I am … the one,” that dangling head informs the Pilgrim, who “evilly encouraged the young king. Father and son I set against each other” (Inf. xxviii.134–136). In short, Prince Henry, at Bertran’s instigation, rebelled against his father, the king of England, Henry II (Musa 156). Having cut their bonds, as Bertrand de Born tells Dante, now “I bear my head cut off from its life-source, which is back there, alas, within its trunk. In me you see the perfect contrapasso24!” (140–142). One significant undercurrent here, to be sure, is the impulse to procreate for the sake of progeny, especially in cases concerning royal succession (Quinones, “Fame” 46)—an observation that has not gone undisclosed by scholars. And yet, in Hell, as Ricardo Quinones befittingly notes, succession is ultimately defeated, hope is lost, and “the door of the future is closed” (46). Such sense of loss is witnessed even earlier in the Inferno, given that Cavalcante, who dwells in a comparatively comfortable circle adjacent to Upper Hell, eagerly inquires about “the bright eyes of his brilliant son” (a friend of Dante’s); upon mistakenly construing his boy as dead, Cavalcante “relapses as if there were nothing else of interest for himself ” (47). It is indubitably in the later cantos of Inferno, however, that the father-son bond (its inherent hazards, its tragic repercussions) infuses Dante’s canticle in a way that belies its presence as mere commentary on the principles of genealogical continuity. Fathers lost from sons, sons lost from fathers, sons betraying fathers and vice versa: all these pulse, too, with significations of the inverted bond between Father and Son—which is to say, between God and his Only-begotten (as the Council of Chalcedon phrased it), whom God sent to be sacrificed for the sake of all mortals. If the principles of continuity between human fathers and sons are here disrupted and infringed upon—such that man is locked “in a singleness typical of hell” (47, emphasis added)—this is in order to magnify a greater principle, the larger cosmos, the Christian universe of the Father and Son. To some extent, Quinones grasps this when he asserts that, under Satan’s reign,

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“the father-son link does not simulate the accord of God the Father and God the Son; rather it is converted into a cruel parodic opposite” (47–48). Nevertheless, he, like other scholars, resists carrying this observation all the way through to the canticle’s end, let alone to the end of the Comedy. As for the even more ominous relations in Hell between fathers and sons: certainly a perdition pit-stop in the bolgia of the Falsifiers is warranted. For there, in a hot and sweaty leprous mess, languish the liars and impersonators and alchemists and counterfeiters, whose decaying flesh pours forth a stench while crazily they try “to ease the itching that can never find relief ” (Inf. xxix.80–81). One of the first of these Falsifiers whom Dante meets is Griffolino d’Arezzo. Although an alchemist while on earth, intriguingly he mentions that this is not the reason why he was burned at the stake. Rather, it was because he convinced the dimwitted Albert of Siena—“jokingly, of course”—that he knew “the trick of flying through the air, and [Albert], eager to learn and not too bright,” Griffolino colorfully recounts, “asked me to demonstrate my art; and only just because I didn’t make him Daedalus, he had me burned” (Inf. xxix.112–117). Might this story be of significance to Dante because of its decidedly Christological echoes? After all, we are presented here with a magically attempted (and, so, spiritually invalid) false resurrection: Griffolino attempted fraudulently to imitate Christ’s ascension (Hoffman 58). Such aping of Catholic symbolism, beliefs, and doctrine, as we have already witnessed, is rife in this Dantean abyss. Arguably, it reaches its zenith, though, in the alchemical activities for which Griffolino has been assigned to this infernal pocket. One of Griffolino’s fellow alchemist-cum-lepers, Capocchio, in fact boasts outright to Dante that “you’ll surely recall—if you’re the one I think— how fine an ape of nature I once was” (Inf. xxix.138–139, emphasis added). According to Isidore of Seville, who served as the etymological authority throughout the medieval period, the word simius, or ape, could be traced back to similitudo because “the monkey wants to mimic everything he sees done” (qtd. in Camille 12). For this reason, “the ape came to signify the dubious status of representation itself,” drawing attention as it did to the dangers of “mimesis or illusion in God’s created scheme of things” (Camille 13). And it is this very capacity for mimicry, as Donald Hoffman prudently remarks, that makes alchemists so dangerous: While the ape merely mimics the foibles of man, the alchemical ape of nature manipulates the materials of God’s created world. In this way, the alchemists are not betraying nature in the comparatively simple way sodomites do (i.e. by an inappropriate teleology, using their instruments for, or perhaps at, the wrong

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These alchemists—whose filthy habits reflect their “aim to transmute not merely base metals, as is commonly stated, but gross physical substances, excrement and urine, the very detritus of the body into gold”—are, in effect “perverted priests” (57). Could the fact that these alchemists “abrogate unto themselves the power to reconstruct reality” (57) have some greater allegorical resonance and purpose here? After all, their ambitions, as Hoffman says, were in “co-opt[ing] God’s originating fiat that created light and life” through attempting to conjure “deceitful imitations” and “illusions of illumination”; or, in cruder parlance, they were “appropriating that sacred power to appear to transubstantiate dung into gold” (57). They are, in this way, the contrapositive of genuine priests who perform interior miracles and spiritual conversions—and who are able, quite vitally, to transform the substance of a wheaten wafer into Christ’s Body, while its accidents, its visible “exterior” remains intact (57). Like hypocrites and bogus penitents, the alchemists merely doctor “the exterior to cloak the fetid interior” (57). Jeffrey Schnapp offers a reading of these Falsifiers in even more forceful terms. For him, the sin of this bolgia’s residents is that of “a false replication of God’s creative act: an act of violence against Being and Being’s Supreme Creator, performed via the substitution of the real by its simulacrum—the substitution of logos by mimos, Christ by Anti-Christ, transfiguration as glorification by transfiguration as masquerade” (“Lectura” 75). If Dante’s predominate contempt is for sinners who “attempt to substitute appearance for reality, the worthless for the valuable, the material for the spiritual,” that may be because their “miracles” of metamorphosis, once again, refuse “the interior transformation that occurs in the Eucharistic model” (Hoffman 61). If indeed the Eucharist was at the center of the later Middle Ages’ entire religious system,25 then transubstantiation, which miraculously disconnects substance from accidents, authorizes what Hoffman characterizes as “a peculiar precedent for the devaluation of sensory evidence” (57). Not only that: it is a devaluation that “provides a model for the alchemist’s fraudulent disconnection of what you see from what you get,” and so one that explains why Dante places the alchemists so far down in Hell … . What these tricksters do that so upsets Dante is to parody the Eucharist, appropriating and subverting divine miracles, and repudiating Dante’s crucial thematics of conversion by substituting a change of appearance for a change of essence, by privileging the external appearance over interior reality. In doing so, the alchemists realize the “inversion of the material and the spiritual,” which

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[Ronald B.] Herzman and [William R.] Cook identify as “one of the most serious problems in medieval society.” (57, emphasis added)

Surely it is no coincidence that, when in Purgatory we reach the alchemists’ numerically comparable canto, we shall meet up with a procession characteristic of those associated with the Corpus Christi feast—one that heralds Christ’s genuine arrival; his real, if not yet his Real, presence. The impersonations turn bodily in Canto xxx, with Gianni Schicchi—angry, crazy, even “rabid” (Inf. xxx.33)—sinking his teeth into Capocchio’s neck. As Musa helpfully mentions in an explicatory footnote to that scene, Gianni, who was “well known for his mimetic virtuosity,” was asked by Simon Donati to impersonate Simon’s father (who was dead), so that he, Simon, could alter his father’s will. Not only did Gianni do so expertly, he managed through his charade to will himself a prize mare (163). Hoffman assists us, yet again, in detecting the transubstantiation “aping” ostensibly decisive to Dante’s inclusion of Gianni in this level of Hell: “What Dante perceives is that, whatever Gianni’s motives may have been, his deceit itself involves the falsification of the flesh … . In this case, it is the essence of the individual that is transformed and transgressed, dispossessed rather than transubstantiated” (59). Myrrha, who likewise inhabits this pocket of infected souls and whose depravity is famously recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is, in Dante’s poetic recast, one who was “too much her father’s friend. She went to him, and there she sinned in love, pretending that her body was another’s” (Inf. xxx.39–41). In this way, Dante’s motivations for placing these sinners here may be no less for reasons of incest or will-doctoring (as the modern reader is likely, albeit understandably, to infer) than because of their having performed bodily impersonations. Egregiously, these individuals took on false flesh, in order to execute their crimes of either passion or greed.26 Here too we see that doubling motif, only this time in the form of impersonations that assault “the founding principle of human and divine laws” (Schnapp, “Lectura” 78). These are self-alchemists, in a manner of speaking, who “perform a double act of violence against being. They falsify the identity of another, and in doing so, falsify themselves,” thus disrupting “the natural laws governing progeneration and generational succession” (78).27 Indeed, this only accents further Dante’s critically lauded skill at qualitatively making his Inferno a region where “things both are and are not what they seem” (Cassell 115). And then there is Master Adamo, a counterfeiter not of his own body per se but of gold coinage stamped with the body of Christ’s forerunner, John the Baptist. As Adamo comes clean to the Pilgrim, it was in “Romena, where I

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learned to falsify the coin stamped with the Baptist, [and] for which I paid with my burned body there” (Inf. xxx.73–75). Adamo is retributively quick, however, to blame those who “encouraged [him] to turn out florins whose gold contained three carats’ worth of alloy” (Inf. xxx.89–90)—and so, twenty-one, instead of the standard twenty-four, carats of gold that a florin was expected to contain (Musa 165). Could some anagogical overlap exist here, as Hoffman theorizes, between the circular symbols of a money economy (a principle of exchange that Adamo is both denying and destabilizing) and “that circular sacrament” of the Host (60)? Hoffman posits that the relative triviality of Adamo’s crime, at least by contemporary standards, must be understood in light of its imbrication with “the full range of human corruption” (60). The falsification of coins, he argues, “undermines both the symbolic transformation accomplished in the Eucharist and the system of economic exchange that enables the body politic” (60). Hoffman is not the sole analyst to have teased Christian meaning out of Adamo’s shady shade so bloated with dropsy that he is “shaped like a lute” (Inf. xxx.49). According to Denise Heilbronn, even Adamo’s grotesque shape is religiously inflected, given the long tradition of the likening of the crucified Christ to a stringed musical instrument (Durling, “Canto xxx” 387). In this way, as Durling extrapolates, Adamo’s sentence “is a distorted, parodic parallel to the Crucifixion” (387). We are, accordingly, moving through the figurally corrupt, much as, in the ensuing two canticles, we shall be incrementally shedding corruptibility, in order to approach—purely—that which is completely incorruptible, the Host. Those who perpetrate sin by attempting alchemically to falsify precious metals or by feigning that their own bodies are somebody else’s are, as we have seen, forced to endure a Hell of their own bodies, which are decaying, putrid, sloughing, dropsical, sometimes tonne-heavy. But even more dastardly— especially when appraised through a Eucharistic lens—are the fates of those sinners who must endure eating, or being eaten by, another’s body. This is exactly what Dante encounters further on, in that icy lake of Cocytus. There, in the bottom of the universe—replete with brothers or close relatives locked in fratricidal embraces (Ahern, “Canto xxxii” 417)28—Dante espies two souls. The wretched pair, as our Poet recalls, were frozen together in a single hole, so that one head used the other for a cap. As a man with hungry teeth tears into bread, the soul with capping head had sunk his teeth into the other’s neck, just beneath the skull. Tydeus in his fury did not gnaw the head of Menalippus with more relish than this one chewed that head of meat and bones. (Inf. xxxii.124–129)

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These notorious two are the noble Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, with Ruggieri serving as the skull-crunchy brain-mush upon which Ugolino feasts. If this description sounds more indelicate hyperbole than productive context, consider John Ahern’s assertion that here, and in the next canto, “various parts of the head (skull, brain, eyes, eyelids, ears, cheeks, scruff and nape of the neck, mouth, lips, tongue, throat, and hair) appear obsessively” (“Canto xxxii” 419). Ahern adduces that this is in part because the head (capo) is the domicile of reasoning and spoken language, which conjointly give rise to society and the political body; but as he also beneficially advises, the head of the redeemed human society is, for the Christian community, Christ (419). And so, the “reduction of the traitors to heads sticking out of the ice mocks their mockery of the unity of the body politic under a single head” (419). Yet, the true thematic locus of this canto, he argues, is categorically the mouth (416), with Dante’s Underworld itself a mouth—“‘a bottom that devours’ (xxxi, 142 …),” a “‘savage maw’ (xxiv, 123)” that renders speech difficult (416). When it comes to Ugolino and Ruggieri, more specifically, the single hole, or buca, in which they are imprisoned “parallels the pit (buco) of Hell itself,” with speech, the very activity that facilitates community, yielding here to cannibalism—to an activity of the mouth that fundamentally destroys community (Ahern, “Canto xxxii” 420). Even more compelling vis-à-vis Ahern’s reading, given our own, is his suggestion that Ugolino’s man-eating—which, as we saw, Dante likens to hungry teeth tearing into bread—is more than mere figurative speech. The unusual word for “eating” that Dante uses in this circumstance is, after all, manducare, the same word that the Latin Bible employs when Christ tells his disciples to eat his body in order to be saved (John 6:52). In Christianity eating Christ’s body under the form of bread creates and maintains the collective body of the redeemed that is the Church. Here, by contrast, a secular head quite literally consumes a spiritual head in vengeful ingestion … . (420)

This is an upended communion, in other words, an inversion of the redemptive, sacramental eating of (Christ’s own) Body. Ahern is not alone in drawing out this association either. Hawkins similarly gestures toward what Dante is setting up via this gruesome image of one man gnawing another, of one man’s teeth fused to another man’s skull: “the perversion of a Communion, with flesh becoming bread” (Dante 43–44). Before elaborating on the cannibalism enacted by Ugolino on Ruggieri, it is worth our pausing to take account of the fairly universal human abhorrence for nourishing one’s body by way of a fellow human’s body—and the act’s

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unavoidable interplay, consequently, with sacramental theology. “The body is always a complex image,” as Rubin exhorts, “and eating the body is a particularly disturbing one, especially that of eating a sacrificial body, sometimes in the form of a child’s body … . But in the eucharist God’s body was to be eaten, blood, flesh, and all, as a matter of course” (Corpus 359–360). No wonder, then, the long legacy in Christian writings of cannibalism as a topic. Centuries before Dante, Augustine in City of God had prefaced his discussion of resurrection with an acknowledgment, in Jacoff ’s words, of “how distasteful the idea was to his pagan contemporaries and how uneasy he was with the way it lent itself to such inquiries” (“Body” 121). But the most pressing question to address, Augustine himself conceded, had to do with the fate of human flesh when eaten by another human being: “Is it then to be returned to the man whose body it had been originally? Or to the man whose flesh it became?” (qtd. in Jacoff, “Body” 121). Later, this problem, known as the “chain consumption argument,” would infiltrate resurrection discourse, and its obsessive preoccupation “with anxieties about dismemberment, dissolution, and absorption” would make its way entirely into the medieval imagining of Hell (Jacoff, “Body” 121). Such anxieties must be kept in mind, Jacoff advises, “when we think of the prevalence of cannibalism in the concluding cantos of the Inferno” (121). Theology is hardly the only place we need look for signs of Christianity’s historical anxiety about eating human flesh. The miracle stories pervasive during the centuries leading up to—and particularly immediately after—the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, when transubstantiation was made doctrine, indubitably attest to autophagic apprehension. Ronald Rychlak notes that many of the hundred-plus Eucharistic miracles recognized by the Church occurred precisely during times when faith in transubstantiation was weak. The patent ascendancy of such miracles during the thirteenth century was conceivably induced not only by how others perceived Christians (as eaters of Christ’s flesh) but by an internal skepticism regarding whether or not it really was Christ’s flesh. Thus, in Alatri, Italy, in 1228, a young woman who plans to use the Eucharist as a love potion, finds it “no longer like bread, but … turned the color of flesh—which she knew to be alive” (Cruz 30). Loosely fifty years later, in Lanciano, Italy, another woman, intent on using the Eucharist as a nostrum, attempts to heat it into a powder, only to witness it metamorphose into a chunk of bloody flesh (70). Horrified, she buries the Body of Christ, until guilt finally overcomes her and she confesses her sin: “I have killed God!” she exclaims to her confessor. But when the priest retrieves the Host, he discovers that the tile

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(on which she had tried to cook it) and the tablecloth in which she had wrapped both, are not contaminated—and, so, Father Giacomo “carried the tile, the Host, and the tablecloth to his monastery” (70–71). A witness to the consecrated bread miraculously transmuting into human flesh was not the only means of validating Eucharistic presence. A noncannibalistically tinged miracle tells of the joyous power of the Host turning into an actual child. This miracle, which took place in Braine, France—where, according to tradition, “a great many non-Catholics lived”—occurred while the Archbishop of Soissons was celebrating Mass (Cruz 19). Upon the elevation, “the people saw, instead of the Host, a small child,” the vision “apparently so magnificent and impressive that the non-Catholics, now filled with the Holy Spirit, demandèrent le baptême—demanded Baptism” (19). Conversion through seeing the Christ-child came, as well, in less pacific narrative forms. One of the earliest of Church-sanctioned Eucharistic miracles, recorded by the Egyptian Desert Fathers, concerned a father who “had doubts about the Real Presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread and wine” (Rychlak). While attending Mass, two of his compatriot monks therefore prayed for his faith to be strengthened. During the ceremony, when the bread was placed on the altar, the three men saw a small child there. When the priest put out his hand to break the bread, an angel descended with a sword and poured the child’s blood into the chalice. When the priest cut the bread into small pieces, the angel also cut the child into pieces. When the men drew near to receive Communion, the skeptical man alone received a morsel of bloody flesh. Seeing this, he became afraid and cried out: “Lord, I believe that this bread is your flesh and this chalice your blood.” Immediately the flesh became bread and, and he took it, giving thanks to God. 29 (Rychlak)

There is additionally the famous case of the miracle of Bolsena, recounted in Chapter 1, which, according to P.J. Fitzpatrick, spells out “the implication of camouflage in a picturesquely disgusting way” (223)—and so, too, the many other miracles which I also earlier related, such as of nuns seeing an infant appear in the Host. In other words, we cannot—and should not—read the cannibalism in these last cantos as being solely representative of man’s injustice to other men, just as we should not read Ugolino’s “banquet” as exclusively political in its purport. Hell is, after all, as Jacoff judiciously notes, the locus of the “sacrilegious meal” (“Body” 125, emphasis added). It is also the locus where compagna, companionship (a word etymologically derived from the Latin cum

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and panis, meaning “with bread” [Soukup 17]) is completely non-apparent; and this is notwithstanding Dante figuratively describing Ugolino and Ruggieri’s relationship apropos the eating of bread.

The food of full-grown men For Augustine, Christ descended to earth to reverse humankind’s selfishness, its “lust to dominate”—a propensity altogether at odds with the Love that had struck him upon his conversion (qtd. in Gaudoin-Parker xxv). “Your light shone upon me in its brilliance,” he expressed to God in his Confessions, “and I thrilled with love and dread alike … . and I heard your voice calling from on high saying, ‘I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead, you shall be changed into me’” (xxv, emphasis added). Augustine’s words underscore the “stark simplicity of the Eucharistic mystery,” as Michael Gaudoin-Parker observes, whereby the Christian flock is converted “from being consumers into being consumed by Love” (xxv). Dante’s iceflat of eternal anguish, on the other hand, offers us a direct reversal of this substantive and sacramental change. Nowhere is this claim more sharply substantiated than in the story Ugolino narrates to Dante. The archbishop on whom he now foully feasts was essentially his executioner, the prelate who imprisoned him in a tower. (In short, Ugolino had entered into an alliance with Ruggiero in order to take control of Pisa, but that backfired (Yates 92).) The “inhuman circumstances of [his] death” (Inf. xxxiii.20), however, are what Ugolino is most eager to describe, whether this be out of moral rectitude or for the sake of winning the wayfarer’s pity. (As for why Ugolino is this deep in Hell: it is for betraying his country (Musa 180)). The sacramental saliency of Ugolino’s soliloquy bears its being repeated here in full: Now listen, then decide if [Ruggiero] has wronged me! Through a narrow slit of window high in that mew (which is called the tower of hunger, after me, and I’ll not be the last to know that place) I had watched moon after moon after moon go by, when finally I dreamed the evil dream which ripped away the vile that hid my future. (Inf. xxxiii.21–27)

This dream, to paraphrase, was of Ruggiero as a huntsman, pursuing a hewolf with its cubs. When the father-wolf and its sons grew tired, Ugolino imagined seeing “long fangs sunk deep into their sides, ripped open” (Inf. xxxiii.181). Waking just prior to dawn, Ugolino found himself back in

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that tower, alas, alongside his sons who had been imprisoned with him. This is what next he heard—and saw: my children sobbing in their sleep (you see they, too, were there), asking for bread. … And then they awoke. It was around the time they usually brought our food to us. But now each one of us was full of dread from dreaming; then from below I heard them driving nails into the dreadful tower’s door; with that, I stared in silence at my flesh and blood. I did not weep, I turned to stone inside; they wept, and my little Anselmuccio spoke: “What is it, father? Why do you look that way?” (Inf. xxxiii.38–51)

Given our Eucharistic focus, it is hardly possible, I imagine, for the reader not here to see—and hear—the clear echoes of Christ’s Passion: in the nails driven into wood and the silent stare at one’s own “flesh and blood”; in Anselmuccio’s questioning of his father, modeled perchance on Christ’s own filial incertitude as expressed in the Garden of Gethsemane. And when Ugolino and his sons’ cell is illuminated by a weak ray of sun, what does Ugolino see? Himself—reflected four times in his children’s faces: I bit my hands in anguish. And my children, who thought that hunger made me bite my hands, were quick to draw up closer to me, saying “O father, you would make us suffer less, if you would feed on us: you were the one who gave us this sad flesh; you take it from us!” (Inf. xxxiii.57–63)

When the fourth day comes, his son, Gaddo, falls prostrate before his father’s feet, crying out, “Why don’t you help me? Why, my father?” (Inf. xxxiii.69). Surely, as readers, we now hear—this time, through Gaddo—the solemn reverberations of Christ’s final words on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (qtd. in Freccero, “Bestial” 57). Even more, right after his confused query, Gaddo dies, as Ugolino sorrowfully narrates, with “the other three fall[ing] one by one, as the fifth day and the sixth passed. And I, by then gone blind, groped over their dead bodies. Though they were dead, two days I called their names. Then hunger proved more powerful than grief ” (Inf. xxxiii.70–75). His story completed, our raconteur glares down in rage at the archbishop with whom he is eternally coupled and “attack[s] again the wretched skull with his teeth sharp as a dog’s, and as fit for grinding bones” (Inf. xxxiii.77–78). And so, the fiend who denied Ugolino and his sons food now becomes—without visible end—Ugolino’s grim repast. At this point, Dante righteously rues the suffering Ugolino’s children endured because of their father’s treason, thus bringing the episode of the ignoble noble Ugolino to its close.

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Ignoble—and yet, as John Freccero writes, this macabre episode, which is “virtually the last in Dante’s Inferno, has been considered through the centuries as one of the most moving accounts of human suffering” (“Bestial” 53). From the time of the Renaissance to that of the Romantic poets, it has been read as an attempt to understand the most unfathomable of evils. The suffering of the children, like the slaughter of the innocents, represents the most radical instance of the irreducibility of evil, just as the mystery of salvation is represented, at a structurally corresponding place, in the Paradiso, by the joy of the children in the celestial rose. (“Bestial” 53)

Frances Yates echoes this sentiment in stressing that the historical Ugolino was “a treacherous tough, like his enemy the Archbishop. He deserved punishment; but it was a tyrannical injustice to destroy the four innocent children with him” (92). For Yates, thus, the cannibalism theme can be mitigated only if one accepts the Ugolino episode as “an allegory of men preying upon one another in an unjust society” (97). But what of the shades to this shade’s story, which are palpably drawn from Christ’s Passion? And what of Gaddo’s willingness, just like Christ’s, to offer up his own flesh for the sake of his father? Of course, Dante never states outright that Ugolino ate his own sons. Instead, we are told, somewhat obscurely, that his hunger eventually overpowered his grief. Admittedly, not all scholars take Ugolino’s allusive—even elusive—last line as proof of his having been driven by hunger to cannibalism.30 A.N. Wilson, for instance, reads Ugolino’s comment as signifying his having possessed a grief even stronger than his hunger (211). Nevertheless, most commentators, as even Wilson concedes, accept that the count ate his own brood (211). Given what we have already Eucharistically exposed, I would suggest that this was indeed Dante’s intention—and in an intentionally veiled fashioned, as was his wont. Here, I follow Freccero in rejecting that the allusions to Christ’s Passion are mere “pietistic embellishments” meant only to contrast with the infernal horror of Ugolino’s story: they are, rather, “the key for the whole dramatic interpretation” (“Bestial” 57).31 The Christological pattern, as Freccero amplifies, is not only linguistic: To speak of a sacrifice of a son in the presence of a father who only half understands the gesture is inevitably to recall, if only by contrast, the moment of the foundation of Israel in the story of Abraham and Isaac. To a Christian interpreter, that story is the foreshadowing of the Redemption; the sacrificial animal substituted at the last moment for Isaac is the prefiguration of the Agnus Dei. (“Bestial” 57)

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Just as necessary is to recall Christ at the Last Supper, when he performed his ultimate sacrifice, his “complete surrender to the will of the Father” (Soukup 11). While Christ is resultantly able to be “eaten by the faithful, but not at all dismembered,” as written in the Corpus Christi homily attributed to Thomas Aquinas (qtd. in Durling, “Farinata” 32), in Dante’s Cocytus, the faithless eat—and that which they eat is endlessly dismembered. Would Dante consent to this interpretation regarding what resides beneath the surface of Ugolino’s tale? Here, it might behoove us to turn for reinforcement to the extant scholarly unpacking of what is “there” in Dante, albeit unsaid. Freccero, for one, asserts that interpretive danger lies in not seeing beyond the Comedy’s literal meaning; in being too sensually swayed by its façade such that the poem’s allegorical—and hence spiritual—meaning is never penetrated (Durling, “Farinata” 30).32 Robert Royal more precisely highlights the Christological complexion of the Ugolino episode, drawing attention to the unexpected ways that the episode connects to the Passion—especially in lines 85–87, where the Pilgrim bemoans the horror of Ugolino’s cannibalism. Royal translates those lines as follows: “For if Count Ugolino had the fame/Of having in thy castles thee betrayed,/Thou shouldst not on such cross have put his sons” (98) Indeed, in the original, the word croce (cross) appears—“non dovei tu I figliuoi porre a tal croce”—leading Royal to draw comparison between Ugolino’s sons and “the betrayal and destruction” of that other innocent son, “perhaps the most evil act in history, that was required to redeem the full range of human evil” (98). We can also turn, once more, to Freccero, who exhorts vis-à-vis Ugolino’s son: “The innocent victim placed on a cross by an act of treachery cannot but recall in this, of all poems, the archetypal Victim and the Crucifixion” (“Bestial” 56). And then there is Merrall Llewelyn Price, who unmasks the self-cannibalism of the story, given Ugolino’s grief-stricken biting of his own hands which propels his sons to offer him their flesh (21). For Price, Ugolino resorts to cannibalizing them because, being “blind to the spiritual possibilities of his sons’ words,” he can commune with them only physically (21). Freccero, who likewise perceives Ugolino as a literalist incapable of understanding his children’s offering, interprets the children as having fallen prey to literalism, as well—in their case, with respect to the symbolic portent of their father’s knuckle-biting: “The children apparently misunderstand its nature as a sign and take it to be instead an attempt to eat himself ” (“Bestial” 64). More crucial for us, however, is Freccero’s expressly Eucharistic reading of the awkward dance that transpires between these varying orders of literalism: the “fiero pasto,” the savage repast, has its counterpart in the agape, the sacred feast (63). If the savage repast is a sign of hatred and despair, the sacred feast, contrarily,

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Dante’s Sacred Poem is a sign of hope and love: the Eucharist is the eating of a living body, come ‘l pane per fame si manduca.’ As the Eucharist is the opposite of the corpse, so communion is the opposite of cannibalism and the bread is not only the “bread of angels,” but also of peace in the human community, panis concordiae. Eating food is an action in the biological order, whether the food is bread or human flesh. When it becomes significant behavior in Hell, Dante calls it a “bestiale segno.” (“Bestial” 63)

This bestial sign, as Freccero later states, is the logical opposite of that central mystery of Christianity, the Eucharist (63). The children’s offering of their own flesh is, in this way, “sacramental, a sign that presents what it represents” (63–64).33 But Ugolino (like many a reader, perhaps?) cannot understand that Eucharistic message. If Ugolino dies of starvation, he dramatically reenacts the interpretive failure one finds reflected in the New Testament: that of the Jews’ incapacity to understand Jesus’ exhortation that they eat his flesh (64–65). Literalism, so Freccero concludes, is what “kills” Ugolino spiritually (64). Several other clues additionally substantiate a Eucharistic reading of Ugolino’s terrestrial plight. While Ugolino refers to those in the hunger tower with him as his “children,” and Gaddo, Anselmuccio, and the others call him their “father,” according to historical record, Anselmuccio was the youngest of Ugolino’s grandsons (Musa 181). In reality, Ugolino had been imprisoned with two sons and two grandsons (Yates 92)—and all were markedly older than one might surmise based on Dante’s account: “Anselm[uccio], the younger grandson, was fifteen. The others were really young men and were certainly old enough for guilt despite Dante’s charge in line 90” that they were too young to be culpable (Ciardi 262). Why did Dante make them such young children, Marianne Shapiro queries, “if not to underscore and amplify their sacrificial role?” (130). The analogy with Christ is transparent, she urges: “the blood of the Lamb was shed for all men; he died that we may live. Since both groups of innocent children voluntarily give their life-blood to save others, they are assimilated to the Agnus Dei and figuratively give the blood of Christ” (132). In this way, the Covenant, the Resurrection, is conceptually reversed (139)—or, to borrow from Durling, this scene is, and can only be, an abortive imitation of the Resurrection of the Dead (“Farinata” 10).34 Ronald Herzman writes with equal insistence that the Ugolino episode is “a barren parody of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross” (185). Indeed, Herzman aligns the cannibalism of Ugolino with the Eucharist even more boldly. He also reaches further back in Judeo-Christian history in order to do so, claiming that Dante, who is “acting with particular prophetic urgency in the canto,” is drawing a

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connection to Jeremiah 19:8 (177). That particular Old Testament passage—“I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them”—provides a scriptural parallel, he claims, for Inferno xxxiii’s specific variation of cannibalism (177). The liberties Dante took with the historical Ugolino persuasively bolster, in his mind, his Eucharistic argument: “the sons of Ugolino are linked to their father with pathetic tenderness to show how cannibalism inverts the strongest ties of paternal love; but this love itself becomes a figure for the love of God, who offers His Son in sacrifice for men … ” (183). He, like Freccero, appositely turns, as well, to that most vital of Eucharistic passages, John 6:48–59, in which the Jews misapprehend Christ’s proclamation and see in his words only a wretched cannibalism (184). They received Christ’s message “foolishly,” as Augustine long ago glossed of that biblical passage: “they thought of it carnally, and imagined that the Lord would cut off parts from his body, and give unto them; and they said, ‘This is a hard saying’” (qtd. in Herzman 184). This passage from John does not allusively resonate vis-à-vis this canto alone. As early as Inferno iii, as Treherne observes, the Pilgrim, when facing the cruel inscriptions above Hell’s gate regarding entry into the “doleful city,” expressed semantic confusion: “Their meaning, sir, for me is hard” (qtd. in Treherne, “Liturgical” 146). Such an admission on the Pilgrim’s part, Treherne argues, “echoes the disciples’ response to Christ’s description of himself as the bread of Heaven, and his injunction to them to eat his flesh: ‘durus est hic sermo’ (Jn 6:61)” (this saying is hard) (“Liturgical” 146). Our knowledge of the mind’s workings concerning the taboo of eating human flesh is scant—as is, too, our knowledge of the desires and fears bound up with it. What we do know, however, is that, after 1215, the Eucharist doctrinally combined that which was most holy with that which was “the most aberrant/ abhorrent” (Rubin, Corpus 360). Eating human flesh or imbibing human blood without Divine Providence is “horrible for men,” as Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica (qtd. in Herzman 184). Cannibalistic feasts thus mark the absence of Christ. Without the possibility of consecration, without the miracle of transubstantiation which brings celebrants into Christ’s Body, Hell’s sinners—who are, of course, denied the sacramental bread—are reduced to feeding eternally on the literal species, human flesh. It is worth reiterating, too, that, at the inverted banquet that took place in Ugolino’s prison cell, and now in the realm of the Traitors to which he is doomed, there is no bread. There is bread imagery, to be sure: in Ugolino’s gnawing on his former associate much as “a man with hungry teeth tears into bread” (Inf. xxxii.127); and in the image of his captive children “sobbing in their sleep … asking for bread” (Inf. xxxiii.38–39). But the bread

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never manifests; it is never provided. Alone for the eating is human flesh; and the human flesh-eaters in this gelid lake are of course non- or failed Christians. Could this be a subtle thematic twist on the charges leveled against early Christians that they regularly engaged in “Thyestean feasts”35—which is to say, feasts not unlike Thyestes’ of his own children, whom his vengeful brother Atreus had roasted and served to him (O’Connor 42)? Souls who have refused the Word made flesh are ergo obligated to feast on human flesh.36 This is the bestial non-bread of Death, in other words—quite distinct from the sacramental Bread of Life. And of course this eating—this tearing off of bits of flesh, this meat-and-bones chewing that endlessly pulls apart treacherous sorts like Ruggieri—is, to reprise, antithetical to what happens when Christ is received in the form of the Host. For the Host, as the scholastic Albert long ago stated, contains “the whole Christ in actual reality” (qtd. in Stone, History 320). It—He—cannot be torn asunder. Canto xxxiii does not end with the Poet’s despair at the suffering imposed upon Ugolino’s children. Dante allots some time to his Pilgrim’s encounter with a few more members of Cocytus’ “sinful race”—their faces staring up out of the ice, crystallized tears congealing in the wind-battered hollow of their eyes. “[B]reak off these hard veils covering my eyes,” cries one such hostage to Dante, “and give relief from the pain that swells my heart—at least until the new tears freeze again” (Inf. xxxiii.112–114). Such is the manner by which Dante meets Friar Alberigo, a shade who is not even terrestrially dead yet—though “just how [his] body is in the world above, [Alberigo has] no way of knowing” (Inf. xxxiii.122–123). That friar, as Musa explicates, is one of those persons who, according to Church doctrine, can, “through acts of treachery, lose possession of his soul before he dies,” with a devil inhabiting his terrestrial body until it dies naturally (184). Is this not the utter reversal of the Resurrection? Alberigo’s descent to Hell has been hastened, moreover, because of his having, as an act of retribution, invited his brother and brother’s son to a banquet at which he had them murdered. “The signal to the assassins,” as John Ciardi informs us, “was the words: ‘Bring in the fruit’” (263). Hence Alberigo’s admission to Dante that he is that friar who “offered fruit from the evil orchard” (Inf. xxxiii.119). Alberigo’s faux resurrection thereby hinges with Eucharistic relevance on a sacrilegious meal between family members.37 One of the last individuals whom Dante espies in this region, Branca D’Oria, is similarly assigned to this frozen, inverted grotto for having murdered a family member, this time a father-in-law, with the aid of a nephew. Once again, the murder occurs “after having invited [his father-in-law] to dine with him” (Ciardi 263). Surely these pairs of meals and murders—each one involving three participants—cannot be the byproduct of poetic accident. Do they not fall too

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suggestively close in step with the Last Supper, as well as with Christ’s arrest and crucifixion, which occurred after the shared meal?38 Unlike The Banquet— which is to say, the Holy Mass—here, the food is merely a conduit to death and destruction, not to hope, or love, and certainly not to salvation. These are banquets gone obscenely awry. Worth noting, too, is that Branca D’Oria, like Friar Alberigo, is not yet dead. This we can glean from the Pilgrim’s retort to Alberigo who has divulged Branca’s identity: “‘I think you’re telling me a lie,’ [Dante] said, ‘for Branca D’Oria is not dead at all; he eats and drinks, he sleeps and wears out clothes’” (Inf. xxxiii.139–141). These personages are, in effect, present but not—contrary to Christ, who is the Real Presence, even if we do not witness him eating and drinking, sleeping and wearing clothes. Further, Christ is not dis-united, as these sinners are, what with their defunct souls, yet devilishly living bodies. Friar and Genoese Ghibelline are bodies that are not— not to mention, precise antipodes of the unseen Body that is. For those still dubious, let us consider the opening lines of the next, and last, canto of the Inferno. In Canto xxxiv, caricatures of Christ’s crucifixion, of the Passion more broadly, and also of the Trinity are less oblique—at least according to many a Dantist. True, the hidden intentions of the canto’s opening may remain concealed to “that ‘natural’ reader who [brings] to the poem only an innocent if impressionable eye” (Singleton, Dante Studies I 36); but its playful distortion of Christian symbolism—or perverted parallel of it, more cynically—is patent when interpreted in light of the medieval Mass. The canto begins with a parody of the first lines of the sixth-century Vexilla regis prodeunt (“The banners of the King advance”) (Musa 186). While this liturgical hymn was formerly sung on Good Friday in anticipation of the unveiling of the Cross, here the lines herald the King of Hell. “Vexilla regis prodeunt Inferni,” the canto opens, with the alluded-to banners being a metaphor for Lucifer’s wings (186). For Singleton, the choral timing is fitting, given that the moment when Virgil and Dante reach Satan is precisely the Saturday prior to Passion Sunday (Dante Studies I 37).39 This “aural” allusion to a processional hymn honoring the Holy Cross is of especial interest, given the distinctly flesh-related imagery reverberant in its first verse: “The banners of the king come forth, the mystery of the Cross shines forth, where He in flesh, who made our flesh, hangs upon the gibbet” (qtd. in Singleton, Dante Studies I 37). Indeed, that Christ is alluded to in this fashion is paramount to how, and why, I shall insist upon his parallel presence—as Real Presence—at the very end of the Comedy. For now, though, let us concern ourselves with the sight this upended hymn augurs: one of shades with their “flesh” completely frozen beneath ice,

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all possibility of movement or flight, or of transcending the bodily self denied them. But it is more Dante’s recognition of where he is that petrifies him—or, rather, of what he is (or is not quite): “How chilled and nerveless, Reader, I felt then; do not ask me—I cannot write about it—there are no words to tell you how I felt. I did not die—I was not living either! Try to imagine, if you can imagine, me there, deprived of life and death at once” (Inf. xxxiv.22–27). This bottom cleft of Hell, this Dis, is allusively neither one of Incarnation nor of Resurrection. Neither earthly, nor celestial, it implies instead imprisonment in a bodily limbo.40 Moreover, we find a fittingly debauched allusion to the imago pietatis—in Dante’s description of Lucifer, “king of the vast kingdom of all grief,” as “stuck out with half his chest above the ice” (Inf. xxxiv.28–29). Consequently, Lucifer takes “his pivotal place among Dante’s other proud sinners” who parody the Incarnation: “Stuck in the ice for eternity, Lucifer is even less capable of movement than his defiant brethren”—though he puts on a particularly impressive performance, in reflecting the “paradoxical union of complete human and divine natures in a single person” (Raffa, Divine 63). That paradox is visible in his head alone, with its three faces horrifically, if gaudily, paralleling the Trinity (Musa 187). To be sure, those faces have engendered a veritable host of interpretations, but essential to all of them, as Ciardi detects, is their perversion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (269). As for the rhetorical relish with which Dante describes that one “wearing three faces”: “He wept from his six eyes, and down three chins were dripping tears all mixed with bloody slaver. In each of his three mouths he crunched a sinner, with teeth like those that rake the hemp and flax, keeping three sinners constantly in pain” (Inf. xxxiv.37–57). The three sinners being interminably “crunched” in Satan’s multiple mouths are Brutus and Cassius— conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar—and Judas, who betrayed Christ, and thereby suffers “most of all” (Inf. xxxiv.61). The Christian iconography present in Satan’s tripartite form is indisputably combined with “classic and folklore elements to create a correspondence between the triumphant Trinity of heaven and an infernal trinity” (Ceserani 437). Even the red, yellow, and black colors of Satan’s three faces-in-one potentially signal “qualities attributed to the Trinity” (Musa 187). Whereas the Trinity’s qualities are “Divine Omnipotence, Highest Wisdom, and Primal Love” (14), in this figuratively—and literally—capsized universe, wisdom is forced out by ignorance (black), omnipotence by impotence (yellow), and love is usurped by envy or hatred (red) (187).41 But there is more to quarry from Lucifer’s slavering champing of sinners’ bodies. We might argue, for instance—as Edoardo Sanguineti does—that

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the Ugolino-Ruggieri pairing previously encountered served as a mere foretaste to this provocative Luciferine revelation. Further, this vision of Satan, which comprises Dante’s last glimpse of Hell, shows Satan’s three mouths gnawing on three infamous traitors (Cook and Herzman 381). Significantly, however, Judas is differentiated from the other two, as he alone is “‘champed,’ ‘bitten,’ and ‘clawed’ in Satan’s maw headfirst” (Bynum, Resurrection 299)—the intimation being that Judas, particularly, is “beyond all hope of resurrection” (Price 21). If mutilation and mastication of the body is “a basic image for evil and its punishment,” as Bynum reminds us (Resurrection 299), no image of it would have likely made a greater impression on Dante than that of the Lucifer bedecking the cupola of Florence’s Baptistery. Dante was well acquainted with the geometrically mosaicked ceilings of that edifice, where (amid aerial portrayals of Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, and the Last Judgment) can be found—still to this day—the “grotesque figure of Satan, with three mouths, two protruding snake-like from the sides of his head, each devouring a sinner”; and Dante’s representation of Lucifer, as Reynolds observes sharply, resembles that Florentine figure intimately, down “even to the sinners being crunched in his three mouths” (15, 227).42 (A similar rendering also appears in the 1305 fresco cycle by Giotto in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel—a cycle with which Dante was probably familiar, as he was a friend of Giotto’s and spent time in that city while in exile.) To give the impression, then, that Dante’s depiction of Satan was somehow unprecedented or restricted to his own poetic imagination would be deceitful (Reynolds 15). In fact, if one takes into account the medieval saint’s vita, whose authenticity was often based on its thematic and tropological concordance with earlier saints’ lives, Dante was conceivably making Lucifer even more horrifying and hateful to his audience. Lucifer’s identifiability, his familiarity may well have empowered the Dantean image. Notwithstanding Dante’s poetic importation of a Satan commonly used as a visual aid during sermons, Dante added many suggestively rich and significant details to his invented journey toward that wretched figure (Reynolds 227). One of them directly connects to the cannibalism previously discussed, in fact; for cannibalism is “the ultimate pass, the total absence of love,” as Herzman perceptively remarks, and thus entirely appropriate as an introduction to the person of Satan, who embodies love’s absence (180). In inverting any possibility for love or for earthly communion, cannibalism “inverts the heavenly banquet as it exists on earth, the spiritual eating of the Son of God, the Eucharist” (180).43 Mary Watt also shrewdly concludes that Satan is the Eucharist’s antithesis: “He eats man, as opposed to man consuming the body of Christ. The trinity of his

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victims recalls and mutates the image of the Holy Trinity” (114). This bat-winged monstrosity, moreover—as a perversion of the bird—“recalls and contrasts with the many medieval depictions of the dove hovering above Christ to represent the Holy Spirit” (114). No authors more pointedly alert readers to the oblique resplendence of the Eucharistic motif in the last cantos of the Inferno than William R. Cook and Ronald B. Herzman. Indeed, these authors advise that, through Lucifer’s cannibalistic feast, Dante is reminding his readers that the Eucharist is God’s supreme gift to man, and that this ideal is inverted through the hatred of betrayal. Thus Ugolino’s eating of his children can be seen in direct relationship to Judas’ betrayal because it too is an inversion of the eucharist. The literal eating of the bodies of his sons should be seen as a reminder of the spiritual eating of the body of the Son given by the Father. Here too hatred and treachery are defined through an inversion of supreme love. (381)

It is primarily for this reason that, unlike many scholars who conceive the Inferno as comprising an introductory canto, followed by thirty-three cantos (1 + 33), I instinctively envision it as thirty-three cantos followed by a final one (33 + 1). Doing so casts Satan narratively outside the holy Trinity, and outside the structural excellence of the triune universe. In this way, the “literalist perversion of the sacramental nature of communion” (Jacoff, “Transgression” 62), which Lucifer’s cannibalism represents, is expelled—just as Lucifer himself was expelled from the angelic realm. This is a realm out of which Dante alone has the capacity to escape completely.44 True, Virgil’s “time” here is comparatively painless, spent with his fellow, pre-Christian pagans in the ante-chamber of Hell. But those in these lower reaches of Hell were unwilling to recognize the locus of Christian love and nourishment; and so, their passionate self-consuming is altogether contrary to the consumption that Thomas Aquinas identifies vis-à-vis the Eucharist: What wholesome provision for our dangerous journey we receive in this food! What strengthening manna enriches the traveller! It invigorates the weak, brings back health to the sick; it increases virtue, makes grace abound, purges away vices, refreshes the soul, renews life in the languid, binds together all the faithful in the union of charity! … It is the central pillar of the Church, the consolation of the dead, and the fulfillment of Christ’s Mystical Body. (qtd. in Gaudoin-Parker 100)45

As “food for the soul,” it is, in a final Thomistic analysis, “the true Bread which while being eaten is not consumed” (100). But the Inferno, of course, reifies and rearticulates a food for the soulless—a flesh that is gouged, gorged, and rent. If

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no one reflects that more unforgettably than Ugolino, perhaps that is because, as Freccero has suggested, his canto’s “central interpretive problem” encompasses “the allegorical problems of the relationship of the Spirit and the Letter, of the Word and the flesh” (“Bestial” 66). But is it only this canto—nay, only this canticle—whose allegorical “problem” is that of Spirit and Letter, of Word and flesh? Certainly the allegorical relationship Freccero foregrounds pervades many of the cantos that precede Inferno’s thirty-third. Indeed, if Dante is as formalistically dedicated to unity and symmetry, as critics suggest, would it not be reasonable for us to anticipate this theme beyond Hell’s confines? Treherne, for one, posits that there are key moments during the Pilgrim’s post-infernal journey when “an awareness of God’s creative power is linked—allusively but with striking consistency—to the sacrament of the Eucharist” (“Liturgical” 146). In that case, we should not refrain from systematically pursuing and parsing those moments. Not to do so would be tantamount to denying the Comedy one of its central structuring principles, we might argue. Consider, after all, what Herzman persuasively discerns about the “cannibalism/communion inversion in the story of Ugolino and Ruggieri”— namely, that it not only helps elucidate the end of Inferno’s meaning, but, just as significantly, enlarges the figural relationships between that ending and the endings of the other two canticles (189). Though Herzman remarks that the “parody of the Eucharist is a parody of … seeing God face to face which is the ending of the entire Commedia” and that “in this respect at least, the two cantos must be seen as a unity sharing the same concerns” (189), he does not draw out this relationship in any sustained or substantial way. But therein lies our good fortune, for we shall now take those ostensibly passing comments or lines of summation and evidentially prove their insights to be valid and true. Indeed, given that the Eucharist is the central mystery of Christianity—“the central pillar of the Church,” to quote Thomas once more—obliges us, I think, to pursue that mystery beyond the darkness that is Dis; to follow Dante and Virgil as they pass through the “small round opening” that is Hell’s inverted navel and to enter, alongside them, a realm bright with all “the lovely things the heavens hold” (Inf. xxxiv.137–138).

Notes 1 Dante may be a poet of symmetries, but as Teodolinda Barolini rightfully points out, “his symmetries are not necessarily straightforward or clear-cut. In fact, Dante tends to establish contradictory or, rather, counterbalancing symmetrical structures, such as the odd asymmetrical canticle of thirty-four cantos, which then

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Dante’s Sacred Poem creates a new symmetry by bringing the total number of cantos to one hundred” (88). Barbara Reynolds draws identical attention to Beatrice’s numerological symbolism, additionally noting the Vita nuova’s similar basis in an elaborate patterning based on the number nine (148, 31). Here, Hollander was referring to the “shape of the arrangement of the poems of Vita nuova” (Dante 31), but the adjective suits Dante’s Comedy just as well. This is no more a statement on modern readers than on modern works. As Rubin observes, such works “miss something of the respect for wholes … . Modern works are deconstructed—the parts more significant than the whole. Medieval genius is highly constructed. The systems we consider modern—banking, negotiation, faith, individuality—issued from these expansive minds” (Dante 94–95). Out of deference to Hardt, I include here the full quotation:

Dante’s aim [is] to integrate numbers into the text so that they represent sacred contents and in particular the religious aspect of redemption, as well as being ciphers of personal relations, experiences and names. Yet it becomes evident that the personal dimension is always linked with the Christian doctrine of salvation. In the last analysis arithmetic as well as poetics or rhetoric are subservient to theology. (“Dante” 92). 6 According to Dante’s epistle to Cangrande—though here as explicated by Anthony Cassell—“‘polysemos’ means ‘of several senses,’ whilst the term ‘allegory’ is to be interpreted freely, from the Greek alleon (‘other,’ ‘different’). Allegorical senses are thus ‘other’ or ‘alternative’ or even perhaps ‘alternating’ senses (‘alterni sensus’) which ‘flow around’ the literal narrative “(Ep. xiii.7–8) (Door 120)”. Singleton suggests, in his influential writings, that Dante strove intentionally for a “double vision,” such that literal and allegorical meanings held at once (Inferno I 117). (See n.7, however.) 7 Debate continues on the authenticity of Dante’s letter to Cangrande, in which he outlines his fourfold approach to allegory (literal, typological, moral, analogical). Such an approach was typical in theology, but not in poetry, which was limited to a twofold method (literal and allegorical). Most Dantists putatively accept that only the first four paragraphs of his letter are authentic (Caesar 90). I tend to agree and, so, am disinclined to parse Dante’s poem in the fourfold fashion. Still, it is worth mentioning the Latin ditty popular during the Middle Ages, which served as an aid to recalling the four interpretive senses. In translation, it would go something like this: “The letter teaches events [deeds], allegory what you should believe, the moral sense what you should do, anagogy what you should aim for” (Moevs 176). 8 One of the biblical echoes in Dante’s opening is of Isaiah 38, 10, which, as translated from the Vulgate, is: “I said: in the mid-point of my days I will go to the gates of hell” (qtd. in Foster 157). Such echoes would have been plain to the medieval reader, so Kenelm Foster notes. Further, Dante himself was thirty-five years old

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in 1300, and thus precisely halfway through his own life—at least as measured according to Psalm 90 (“the days of our years are threescore years and ten”) (Royal 37). Even more, 1300 would have biblically constituted the “very center of historical time,” coming “6500 years after the creation of Adam and 6500 years before the end of the world” (Stone, Dante’s 255). Admittedly, Stone goes on to protest that, in spite of this statement’s truth, such a position does not tell the whole story (“Dante” 135). In 1309, just as Dante was composing his Inferno, “the Cathar Perfect Pierre Authie, a leading figure of the Cathar ‘renaissance’ that had arisen in Lombardy, Occitania, and Catalonia, was arrested and tried by the Inquisition; he was sentenced to death and burnt at the stake the following year” (Stone, Dante’s 227). According to the inquisitorial record, he told his accusers that his church held “to the straight path of the apostles,” whereas the Church of Rome did not (qtd. in Stone, Dante’s 227–228). For Stone, this emphasizes that the “journey in question is not Dante’s own personal journey but instead the ‘journey of our life,’ and what is at stake here is not a personal but a collective error” (Dante’s 228). The exact wording in the First Epistle of St. John 2:16–17 is: “For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life, which is not of the Father but is of the world” (qtd. in Cassell 45). Another reading suggests that the beasts are from Jeremiah 5:6 (Royal 40). Even those like Bruno Nardi, who attest to the necessity of interpreting the Comedy politically, have more broadly, “and less arbitrarily, viewed the political significance as an adjunct to the moral, internal meaning” (Cassell 47). The special privileges believed in the thirteenth century to be enjoyed by a person on the day that he or she saw the “Body of the Maker” (i.e., the Eucharist) were “probably much assisted by a legendary element current in the romances of the Holy Grail, then at the height of their popularity” (Thurston, “Exposition”). One wonders, in other words, if Dante may be hinting not only at Paolo and Francesca’s error in succumbing to their lust, but at their misreading the romances in an erotic, rather than spiritual, manner. According to Robert Durling, Farinata unintentionally echoes those who accused Peter of denying Christ (“Canto x” 137). Since the canto’s iconography involves the Eucharist, it is conceivable, so Durling speculates, “that the Cathars’ rejection of the Lord’s Supper (as a sacrament) is partly Dante’s target” (“Canto x” 137). That is, the appellation “Christ” never appears in the text of the Inferno. Here, Jacoff is borrowing from Pier delle Vigne’s account of the canto. See also Marylin Migiel, who argues in favor of a gender-sensitive reading of Geryon’s composite nature, given that, in all but one instance, Dante and Virgil employ the feminine gender when referring to the creature (135–136). Lucan, in his Pharsalia, told of the physical transformations undergone by two

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Dante’s Sacred Poem soldiers in Cato’s army who turned into ashes and a shapeless mass, respectively, after being bitten by a snake (Musa 137). In slightly more detail, Oldcorn suggests that “[i]n this reverse-projection parody of fetal growth or generation, a fully formed man is unmade and at the same time develops the physical characteristics of a serpent while, separately and at a distance, but with mysterious mutuality, a serpent loses its identity as a serpent and becomes a man” (“Canto xxv” 342). Gertrude Leigh writes that Dante warned his readers not to accept Hell “at its surface meaning, but to regard as a ‘menzogna,’ a falsehood hiding a truth he was not at liberty to express” (49). Here, I borrow from Irma Brandeis’ dictum that Dante, in his Comedy, “never serves history; he uses it” (qtd. in Barolini 404). Dante encounters fathers when earlier he meets Farinata and Cavalcante: “literally the father and father-in-law of his closest friend, but also fathers of his city, past leaders of Florence, where they were partly responsible for the heritage of civil strife that plagues it” (Durling, “Canto x” 137). A contrapasso is a form of punishment that reflects the crime—e.g., the slothful who are now mired in muck; the soothsayers whose heads are twisted round so that now they see backward rather than forward. Dante is ingenious when it comes to such punishments. This is Miri Rubin’s assertion, which Hoffman acknowledges and also works off. Jacoff notes that, although the issue for Semiramis (who appears with the Lustful in Hell’s second circle) is mother-son incest, and for Myrrha, daughter-father incest, “in each case the locus of desire is assumed to be the female subject. Furthermore, … they are both represented in strikingly similar rhetorical and prosodic structures. Certain of these structures,” she intriguingly observes, “return in the concluding canto of the Paradiso where they are deployed—in a way that both suggests and evades scandal—in relation to the poem’s ultimate and consummate female figure, the Virgin Mary” (“Transgression” 53). Lino Pertile explicitly refers to the preceding canto’s pair of Capocchio and the Sienese (whom Capocchio interminably insults) as a “good double act” (389). Dante crosses paths with two quarreling brothers who had killed each other over their inheritance, as well as Cain and Abel, who similarly violated the bonds of family, though with only one brother dying at the hand of the other. P.J. Fitzpatrick, who also cites this story, says it can be found in the Vitae Patrum, which includes anecdotes going back to the sixth century (223). As recently as 1977, Freccero argued that Ugolino’s incapacity to comprehend his children’s words is matched by the inability of Dante critics to understand Ugolino’s last words (v. 75): “‘Poscia, più che ‘l dolor, potè il digiuno.’ (Then, hunger was stronger than grief). A traditional reading sees in the verse an allusion

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to cannibalism, confirming a legend that surrounded the death of the historical Ugolino and the children. Another group of critics rejects that reading, preferring instead to interpret the verse as an allusion to Ugolino’s death, construing it as follows: ‘Hunger succeeded in killing me, whereas grief did not.’ In other words, they interpret Ugolino exactly as he interpreted his own dream—the ripping of flanks by teeth as simply a prophecy of death” (“Bestial” 59). We should not ignore Hollander’s fitting observation that the scene also reflects “the parable of the importunate friend” found in Luke 11:5–13 (“Inferno xxxiii” 553). This is said by Freccero—and summarized by Durling—with respect to Inferno ix’s Medusa; but I believe it to be no less transferrable to the discussion of this realm. “Critics who refuse to see in this reticentia anything but death,” Freccero elsewhere states, in slightly harsher terms, “are forced to read [Canto xxxiii] as pure tautology and are at the same time blind to the eucharistic meaning of the children’s offer” (“Bestial” 66). Of additional interest is that, in Giovanni Villani’s fourteenth-century New Chronicles, on the history of Florence, no mention is made of the cannibalistic act. Instead, we are told that, refused food, the prisoners—Ugolino, two of his sons, and the sons of Count Guelfo—“in a few days died there of hunger … . And when all the five dead bodies were taken out of the tower, they were buried without honour; and thenceforth the said prison was called the Tower of Hunger.” Athenagoras made this comment in the 170s (O’Connor 42). I borrow this in part from Raffa, who suggests that, in this feasting, Ugolino is mockingly defying the Incarnation (Raffa, Divine 48). Jacoff makes a similar assertion about Branca d’Oria, although not necessarily for similar reason. Still, “[Branca’s] treachery (the murder of guests at a banquet),” she says, “implies a sacrilegious meal” (“Body” 125). Nevertheless, we continue to witness here, as Sanguineti observes, “that pattern of duplicitous pairing that has marked, earlier in the crowd of the damned, ‘those two who go together’ (Paolo and Francesca (v, 74)) and those two who shared one ‘flame/with horns’ (Diomedes and Ulysses (xxvi, 68))”; in this way, Ugolino is at once assigned “to the great gallery of infernal couples who speak with a single voice” (425). Remo Cesarani draws further attention to the scholarly controversies regarding what Dante is doing here:

Francesco d’Ovidio has called this procedure of applying a hymn of the Passion to the suffering of Lucifer a dark parody. Scartazzini, another nineteenth-century commentator, was of the opposite opinion. In his view Dante, without ironic intent, applies the words of the hymn to Lucifer to signify the contrast between the prince of darkness and the prince of light.

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40 For Singleton, the cold wind that produces Cocytus’ ice “is the ironic negation of that spiration of Love that moves the sun and all the stars [in Paradise], and whose warmth opens the rose of the blessed in the heaven of pure light” (Dante Studies I 42). 41 Alison Morgan confirms this observation:

Dante is learned poet, not an uneducated visionary. Satan’s three heads are of different colours, and from the time of the early commentators they have been regarded as symbols of the three attributes contrary to those of the Trinity— impotence, ignorance, and hate. Satan, located in the depths of Hell, is thus placed in clear spiritual antithesis to the Trinity, which Dante sees in his final vision in the Paradiso. (22) 42 The mosaics in the cupola of Florence’s eight-sided Baptistery—the very edifice in which Dante dreamed that one day he would be crowned poet laureate—“are presented in concentric bands” that commence “to the right of the damned and move round to completion on the left of the saved. … [T]hree zones of the cupola are given over to the Last Judgment, with the great figure of Christ flanked on his right hand by the saved and on his left by the damned” (Kleinhenz, “On Dante” 283). Meanwhile, the remaining five zones, which comprise “fifteen episodes in the four separate ‘storylines,’ … are arranged so that they can be read both horizontally (that is, in their individual chronology), and vertically (in their typological and allegorical relations, whereby the meaning of one enhances and explicates that of another)” (283). 43 Of course Satan is also much more (as is everything in the Comedy!). As Dante describes upon leaving Hell’s domain, he is also “‘il vermo reo che ‘l mondo for a’—‘the wicked grub which bores through the world’” (Ralphs 3). In other words, as Sheila Ralphs nicely expounds, riffing off Dante’s clear Edenic overtones, “Lucifer is eating away the apple. He is the cause of the rottenness in the earth’s sphere which shows itself on the surface of the northern hemisphere—the bad half of the apple— in the tangled, sterile wood” (3). 44 It is also a climb whose “stairs”—which are in actual fact “the shaggy shanks of Dis” (Inf. xxxiv. l. 79)—are, for Freccero, a representation of the Cross: “By turning upside down at the center of the universe, the pilgrim and his guide right the topsy-turvy world of negative transcendence from which they began” (qtd. in Ceserani 435). 45 This appears in the Maundy Thursday sermon of 1264, which is attributed to Thomas.

4

Betwixt and Between: Dante’s Purgatory

For many readers—perhaps most, these days—Dante’s Inferno, with its imbricated horrors and colorful grotesquerie, is far more alluring than either Purgatory or Paradise. True, sin, revenge, and passion may evoke “more life and dramatic movement than penitence and religious ecstasy” (Federn 284), but to miss— or intentionally elide—the other two canticles; to disregard their associatively vertical and horizontal powers; indeed, to read only “Act I” and relinquish that act’s very raison d’être (its climax, its resolution, its ultimate goal), is arguably to deny the Comedy its sacredness. And Dante’s Purgatory is not only symbolically, but also quite literally, the pathway to that sacredness—or, in another manner of speaking, it operates betwixt and between the “backward” or “wrong” realm of the exclusively flesh-oriented and the “right” or forward-looking realm of the inclusively divine. One need not be Roman Catholic, nor even religious, to appreciate this theologic structuring. The only requirement is to be open and alert to waters seldom traveled, in a Dantesque turn of phrase. And so, this chapter, which will foreground the ways in which Purgatory serves imaginatively, but also sacramentally, as an environs “fette out of fygure [fashioned out of likenesses],” to quote John Lydgate’s fifteenth-century Procession of Corpus Christi; a sensorial environment in which the pilgrimage, I shall argue—paradoxical as this may sound—is largely through the terrestrial, which is to the historical, Christian world. No wonder, then, that Purgatory is steeped in the offices of the Roman Catholic Mass: songs, rituals, prayers, liturgy, allusions to the sacraments (see Atchity; Collins; Moore; Treherne). Peter S. Hawkins, in fact, posits that the underlying narrative structure of Purgatory is based on a physical progression through a medieval church and John Ciardi, that the Pilgrim is progressing toward the altar (Watt 122). Thus is our Pilgrim reoriented here toward the east and toward a cross-shaped church, hearing hymns along the way and seeing “miraculously lifelike friezes that remind the reader of some of the greatest works of medieval religious art” (15). Just as important, given the

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multivalency of meaning welcomed by the medieval Christian mindset, is that we are progressing toward Jerusalem (3). Purgatory is additionally the locus of a lavish parade that vibrantly reflects a Corpus Christi procession—or, if not that in the strictest sense, certainly a momentous likeness to one. For, it is a procession that heralds both the coming—and going—of Christ on earth, which allows for his ascension to Paradise where he shall embody (in this reading of the Comedy, at least) that center of Catholicism, the Eucharist. This is ergo a realm of similitudes and images—of “token and signe of Crists passyoun,” to quote Lydgate once more (l. 62); of that Christ who was “Fruyt celestyal hong on the tree of lyf,” before becoming more directly “oure foode, and oure restoratyf/And cheef repaste of oure redempcioun” (ll. 14–16). Perhaps we should note upfront that, until the sixteenth century, Virgil’s Aeneid was thought to be Dante’s exclusive model for the afterlife (Morgan, Dante 6). Vision literature from the medieval period has since convinced scholars of alternate precursors and even potential sources for Dante’s conception of purgatory as a locale. One finds such vision literature explicitly discussed in works by Albert the Great and Bonaventure, and even Thomas Aquinas mentions its tradition in his writings (4). Vernacular translations of works like Vision of Tundale, Charles the Fat, and Ansellum were popular, as was the tellingly named St. Patrick’s Purgatory (6). The Latin version of this last work survives down to this day in over a hundred manuscripts, with another 150 copies of it translated into all the major European languages of the day (Shinners 504). As a result, it is reasonable, if not all-out prudent, for us to conjecture that it was probably one of the sources that inspired Dante. True, St. Patrick’s purgatory lacks the explicit tripartite structure Dante gives his otherworld. Its purgatory denotes a particular locale in Ireland, “a cave, in which purgation [was] believed to obtainable by the living” (Morgan, Dante 154). Nonetheless, the intriguing correspondences between it and Dante’s poem merit isolation—not to mention that these correspondences sometimes reinforce the thesis that Dante’s poem invites being read through a Eucharistic lens. The inference is not that Dante’s Purgatory lacks innovation. While vision literature may have been widespread, Dante singlehandedly elevated the genre to a superior and, indeed, novel level (McGinn 27). Very possibly this was motivated in part by the doctrine of Purgatory that appeared in 1254 at Pope Innocent iv’s bidding (Wilson 257). A mere decade before Dante’s birth, the Church had authorized purgatory as a legitimate place of purgation in the afterlife (257). While this would sadly initiate the notoriously exploitative selling of indulgences in the centuries to come, its comparative novelty in

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the Trecento may have made it an agreeably legitimated and inspiringly unassimilated canvas for Dante. Consider Dante’s holy mountain of Purgatory: despite that it spiritually imbricates Mount Sinai with the Mount of Transfiguration and Mount Sion, it nevertheless remains “strictly Dante’s invention, in the sense that he followed no Church tradition in making Purgatory a mountain” (Ralphs 23–24). His is also a mountain that Pilgrim and pagan guide peripatetically ascend just prior to daybreak on the festival of Easter—on April 10, 1300, to be exact (Ragg 18). The significance of this, Eucharistically speaking, requires little corroboration. The date of Easter, compounded by the heavy resonances of the Mass that will follow, makes Purgatory the indisputable realm of the Incarnation: of Christ’s prefigured coming to earth; of his life and death on earth; and, perhaps most evocatively, of his final ascension from it. For the medieval participant, the Mass was a sacrifice, reflecting “the offering of Christ to his Father for the needs of the living and the dead” (Hamilton 105). In other words, Christ, when on earth, was conceived as “both human and divine” (Irwin 30), thus emphasizing that dual presence of flesh and Flesh. Dante’s Purgatory is similarly conceived as the principle locus of God as Incarnate—as enfleshed in Christ. Just as critically, God can be found enfleshed in the girl the Poet loved, Beatrice—whom here we shall finally meet—as well as in the Church, the institution that exists “in order to perpetuate the everlasting miracle of the Eucharist” (Wilson 189). By this I mean that Christ’s post-Incarnational history on earth—as the Church Militant—is correspondingly central to the purgatorial realm. And so, if Dante here exhibits a “liturgical piety,” as Collins claims, one “centered on the prayer life of Christ’s bride, the Church” (29), that is fundamental, I shall argue, to Dante’s preparation of his poetic stage, to his ushering us from the nave toward the altar—and preparing us thus for the Host. The religious singing that so often exquisitely, and even mystically, enfolds the souls’ active climb of Mount Purgatory consequently contributes not only to those souls’ “upward movement” (Atchity 98), but augurs the enFleshed sweetness in which this Christian collective hopes eventually to participate.

The reorientation toward Church and Christ The Bible is the Comedy’s “most abundant source of quotations and allusions,” says Peter S. Hawkins; and, for him, the structures that support and govern Dante’s poem most deeply “are the Exodus of Israel and the death and resurrection of Christ” (“Resurrecting” 59). Nevertheless, when it comes to

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concrete references to time and space, Dante is intentionally indeterminate. Purgatory may open on the morning of Easter Sunday, but it is “singularly characteristic” of Dante, as Sinclair observes, never explicitly to draw attention to the temporal correspondences of the Pilgrim’s descent and emergence from Hell “with the times of Christ’s death and resurrection” (Dante’s Purgatorio 28). (Hence it is Sinclair who must, in a post-canto endnote to his translation, inform us that Dante “entered Hell in the dusk of Good Friday; he comes forth when Christ rose, in the hour of wonder and expectancy before dawn” (28).) Purgatory, consequently, is very much a “dialectic of death and rebirth,” replete with mysterious correspondences that not only span but tautly and evocatively interlace the Old Testament with the New. Such interlacing, in fact, resembles the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass, with readings from both Testaments presented in associated form—as both prophesies and fulfillment of Christ’s coming. The missal readings thus interpretively give “an order” to the history of humankind, as Ezio Raimondi astutely offers (2–3). Certainly, too, this serial order—at least as exhibited during Mass—always leads up to the sacrament of the Eucharist, through which communicants are ritually conjoined and renewed. Purgatory is indisputably rife with images promising rebirth and renewal (quite distinct from the Inferno’s haplessly botched and half-beastly births). Indeed, that imagery commences at the very outset, when, in the first canto, Virgil girds Dante with a reed. At the sight of Virgil plucking the “humble plant,” Dante exclaims, “O miracle! When he pulled out the reed, immediately a second humble plant sprang up from where the first one had been picked” (Purg. i.134–136).1 In the next canto, when the Christians newly arrived to Purgatory’s shores are found jointly singing In exitu Israel de Aegypto (When Israel Went Out of Egypt), Dante’s medieval reader would have educed not only their human evasion of Hell but also the Jews’ exodus from bondage in Egypt. This psalm, in other words, signified the prefiguration of Christ rising from the dead (Musa 203) and was commonly sung during the medieval observance of Easter, as well as by pilgrims upon reaching Jerusalem (Watt 4). Since, at this overture in Purgatory’s action “it is Easter Sunday morning, the very day of the Resurrection, the singing of this psalm is particularly appropriate” (Musa 203).2 Dante’s imagery possibly conjured images even more explicit and concrete to his contemporaeneous audience—ones that could be found within the walls of the medieval church. Allegorical (pre)figurations were especially prominent during Easter, when the entire Easter story was performed: “from the crowds shouting ‘Crucify him,’ through Christ’s harrowing of hell, to Christ’s appearance outside the empty tomb” (Watt 123). Even the sign that the angel

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later makes in Purgatory (which explicitly evokes the cross) and the cleansing that precedes that sign recall gestures “associated with entering a church”—as does, too, “the call to genuflect,” which Virgil instructs Dante to do: “‘Bend, bend your knees!’ ( … Purg. 2:28)” (123).3 Also resonant in the medieval imagination would have been the Church as symbolic of the “the saving ark” (123). As Mary Watt powerfully describes, the ark was “prefigured in the story of Noah, fulfilled in Christ’s choice of a fisherman on which to build his church, and commemorated both in the architecture of the church and in the ecclesiastic architectural terminology that names the main corridor of the nave” (124). Boat, church, and pilgrimage are additionally fused in Virgil’s comment to Dante that they too are pilgrims, and this arguably “confirm[s] the hermeneutic strategy behind this barrage of symbols” (124). This barrage, I need reiterate, strategically gestures not only toward the physical church (as a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice) but also toward the very rationale for that church’s existence: participation in that sacrifice via the sacramental wafer. Could this be why, more and more from this point onward, we will encounter references not only to “Three Persons in One Substance” (Purg. iii.36), but to food and to appetites—which possibly intimate a Eucharistic interplay? These references which burgeon like a growing chorus are, in other words, conceivably in anticipation of the transubstantiation that Paradise will bring. At this juncture though we, like the Pilgrim, are first required to participate in the “corporate word of Scripture” (Hawkins, Dante 257). And how expertly, and even brazenly, Dante recurrently reveals this necessity—such as when he describes those souls who, “realizing that I was still alive, in their amazement turned a deathly pale,” and who stared at him “[j]ust as a crowd, greedy for news, surrounds the messenger who bears the olive branch … ” (Purg. ii.68–71). Given that the olive branch was a signal of good news, we might posit that Dante is here evoking the “Good News” (Matt. 24:14), which is coinage for Christ’s message. And what, in even more specific terms, is this Good News for Christians? Nothing less than the promise of their restored relationship with God; of their salvation which Christ is said to have brought through his message and human presence on earth. The Good News is the Light that figuratively casts its rays upon the darkness. As a result, we should not be surprised to find Virgil explicating the nature of this light in Canto iii, in response to Dante’s perplexity regarding his own body. Dante’s body casts a shadow, after all, while Virgil’s curiously does not. According to Sinclair, passages like these illustrate the common purgatorial theme of the dualism of flesh and spirit: “the flesh impos[es] its own limited standards of reality on the soul, obstructing the light of the sun and setting the

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pull of gravity against the soul’s aspiration. It is a dualism which is not to be resolved in theory, only in experience” (Dante’s Purgatorio 53). At first, Sinclair’s reading may appear a thematic stretch—until one takes into account the discussion of One Substance in Three Persons, of “una sustanza in tre persone,” that directly precedes Virgil’s explication. “Be satisfied with quia [the ‘because’] unexplained, O human race!” he exhorts his charge. “If you knew everything, no need for Mary to have borne a son” (Purg. iii.36–39). Dante presents us, in fact, with a veritable constellation of allusions that orbit around Christ’s dual nature on earth: as human and divine son (and Son), as flesh and Flesh; or, if we prefer, as two “ontological extremes represented by the Trinity and by the physical body” (Kirpatrick, “Canto iii” 30).4 That Canto iii ends with a reference to the Church is thereby apt, as Robin Kirpatrick stresses, for the Church is “now seen for what it truly should be: not a political institution but rather the living body of those who seek prayers and seek to pray” (36). Its true nature, however, will only be revealed in the final cantos of Purgatory, he observes, with the advent of Beatrice. I would add that Beatrice, in this way, will be reflecting Christ on earth. Her role is to animate his terrestrial presence—or, to borrow from the last lines of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Beatrice will “gaz[e] on the countenance of the One who is through all ages blessed” (xlii, 84)5; and, through that gaze, she will not only “illuminate for [Dante] the true meaning of prayer” (Musa 225), but will, quite imperatively, put him on the path to faith’s true meaning through the Eucharist, which can be achieved neither through intellect nor through reason alone.6 The promise of Christ surely resounds musically in our sojourners’ approach to the doors of Purgatory. The Pilgrim reports hearing the singing of Salve Regina (Purg. vii) as well as the ancient hymn Te lucis ante (Purg. viii). True, these songs’ lyrics may, as in the case of Salve Regina, be signaling the arrival of “Mary, God’s own Mother” (and, so, a Lady of genuine fortune, in contradistinction to the Lady of Fortune in Inf. vii); or, as in the case of Te lucis ante, they may be a petition for “‘guardian care’ against ‘dreams and phantoms of the night’” (Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 115). The latter may even be commemorating one’s “initiation into sacred life,” given that the liturgical composition was sung when a man left lay-life to enter a religious order (Hawkins, Dante 260). Moreover, the Poet informs us that the hymn Te lucis ante was “sung through to the end” (Purg. viii.17), such that medieval audiences would have very likely recalled its last lines: “Through Jesus Christ, thine only Son,/Who, with the Holy Ghost and thee,/Doth live and reign eternally” (“Te lucis ante”). Perhaps they would have also recalled the last lines of Salve Regina, with its appeals to the Virgin

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for prayers to render them “worthy of the promises of Christ” (Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 104). As we accompany Dante toward the portal to Purgatory, in other words—which emblematically doubles as entryway to a church—we are correspondingly approaching the coming of Christ, both as Incarnate and as Church Militant.7 Intriguingly, this is where Dante teases us with the promise of a veil that is semantically “thinner,” thus making his truth’s meaning presumably easier for us to glean: Sharpen your sight, Reader: the truth, this time, is covered by a thinner veil, and so, the meaning should be easy to perceive. I saw that noble host of souls, who now in silence kept their eyes raised to the heavens, as if expectant, faces pale and meek, and then I saw descending from on high two angels with two flaming swords, and these were broken short and blunted at the end. Their garments, green as tender new-born eaves unfurling, billowed out behind each one, fanned by the greenness of their streaming wings. One took his stand above us on our side, and one alighted on the other bank; thus, all the souls were held between the two. My eyes could see with ease their golden hair, but could not bear the radiance of their faces: light that makes visible can also blind. “From Mary’s bosom both of them descend to guard us from the serpent in the vale,” Sordello [the Mantuan shade] said. “He’ll be here soon, you’ll see.” (Purg. viii.13–39)

According to Watt, the keen reader of this passage will find this mobile, angelic “gateway” reminiscent of those Pillars of Hercules through which Ulysses passed and met his demise (127). Only this gateway, in intentionally reversing that earlier trajectory—sending us east, toward Jerusalem and, hence, toward Christ on earth—irrefutably spells our salvation (127). The veil may signify a number of other things, to be sure. It may, as Herbert Kessler remarks, stand “for Jewish literalism that cedes to true Christian understanding” (177) or be representative of “Christ’s human nature through which heaven has been opened to the faithful” (145). Regarding the latter possibility, Kessler cites the Epistle to the Hebrews, which announces, in 10.19–20, that “the blood of Jesus makes us free to enter boldly into the sanctuary by the new, living way which he has opened to us through the curtain, the way of his flesh” (qtd. in Kessler 145). Here too, then, we find tenable resonance apropos Christ taking on a fleshy existence in order to facilitate humankind’s entry into salvation. The formal, symbolic nature of Purgatory’s “liturgical universe,” as Raimondi calls it (qtd. in Ross 87), no doubt enhances the gateway’s spiritual efficacy. Signification is often effected through things (Ross 87) or through rituals, such as Dante beating his breast or asking the guardian angel admittance, or in that angel’s possession of two keys. The formality of events, their ceremonial power, likewise underscores the extent to

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which Dante’s world remains that of the Middle Ages (87). Is it any wonder, then, that some contemporary readers might find the “multiplication of symbols” inherent in the seven P’s with which the Pilgrim’s forehead is marked—they will be gradually erased along his purgatorial journey—“tedious,” even “irksome” (Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 129)? This was probably not the case for Dante’s initial readers, however, for whom “the imagery and ordinances of the Church were as natural and inevitable as the courses of the stars and seasons so that any mere hint of them would carry its immediate sense and more than the sense of the words” (129). If the Pilgrim’s upward journey through Purgatory finds a parallel in the journey to Jerusalem—in tandem with through a church—feasibly, then, Dante’s energetic reflection of the “return to the altar” (Watt 130) is not only metaphorical but also quite literal. The journey comprises not only a ceremonial progression through the ritual of Mass, in other words, but toward that most sacred part of the church, the sanctuary, where the Mass is physically celebrated. (Pertinently, Ciardi, in his translation of the Comedy, thanks Archibald MacAllister for pointing out that Purgatory “is built upon the structure of a Mass,” a Mass occurring “not on the mountain but in church with Dante devoutly following its well-known steps” (365).) Hence the chanting in Canto ix of that hymn of gratitude, Te Deum laudamus (“We Praise Thee, O God”), which Dante hears in concert with “the sweet notes of that door” opening the way to Purgatoryproper (Purg. ix.141). With tacit irony, Dante affiliates our emergence into this sacred environs with (and contra) the non-faithful. It was in the corresponding tenth canto of Inferno, after all, that Dante and Virgil passed the tombs of the Epicurean heretics, those deniers of the immortal soul. Upon entering the gate, Pilgrim and guide immediately come upon the carvings on the Terrace of Pride—which, later we are told, were made by God, “That One for Whom no new thing can exist” (Purg. x.94). In his comprehensive analysis of these carvings, Matthew Treherne specifically highlights their association with medieval notions of the Eucharist—and they are, even more specifically, I would suggest, representative of Christ’s Incarnation on earth, as both man and Ecclesia militans. We find, in the first carving, for instance, Mary’s humility as expressed at the Annunciation, that moment when Christ was incarnated in Mary’s womb. Such depictions commonly decorated tabernacles, Treherne reports, as they drew “a link between the conception of Christ and the elements of bread and wine in the Eucharistic host” (“Ekphrasis” 186). Even more, the salvation brought through the Eucharist was often “related in the medieval theology to the Virgin”—a point Treherne reinforces in recalling Peter

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Damian’s sermons, which associated Mary with the Eucharist (187). But that relationship was not new; it had been long present in the Christian tradition: Ambrose, in De mysteriis, had said that in taking the Eucharist, “corpus quod conficimus ex Virgine est” [“the body is made of the Virgin”]; Bruno of Segni also insisted that “ita et panis iste coetestis benedictione mutatur in carnem Christi, non in aliam quidem, quia non habet aliam, nisi illam, quam de Virgine matre suscepit” [“the bread is changed into Christ’s flesh … which he received from the Virgin mother”]. (186–187)

This relationship will re-emerge, and in especially salient fashion, upon our reaching the Empyrean of Paradise; for, before completing the final stage of his entire journey, Dante will behold “the Queen who holds as subject [that] devoted realm” (Par. xxxi.116–117). Even the second carving which Dante espies—that of “David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant” (Purg. x. 55–69)—has Eucharistic associations, according to Treherne: In general terms, medieval biblical exegesis considered David to be a type for Christ. And Dante in the Convivio had described him as “David, del qual nasce la baldezza e l’onore de l’umana generazione, cioè Maria” [David, of whose lineage was born the pride and the honor of the human race, Mary] (iv, v, 5). More specifically, David’s humiliation also prefigures Christ’s crucifixion. (“Ekphrasis” 187)

Note, again, how the focus is on the incarnated Christ, the Flesh enfleshed. According to Robert Durling, the broad distinction made here is between the positively conceived body and a flesh that “hinders the soul in its ascent” (qtd. in Treherne, “Ekphrasis” 191). But is it possible that, in not taking note of the paradigmatically Eucharistic dimensions of the Comedy, this reading is somewhat incomplete? True, that shift from the flesh—which is experienced, much as Durling suggests, through the abandonment of the stones weighing down the penitent souls—“is a move into the Christic body” (Treherne, “Ekphrasis” 191); but could it not also be a celebration of Christ as having taken on a human body? In Purgatory, in other (more scrupulously chosen) words, we celebrate Christ’s incarnated body, and we do so before we can—and because his coming to earth made us able to—rise to the resurrected Body of Christ. Consider the allusions to the promise of a return, which are unambiguously part of the carving of the emperor Trajan: “[T]here rode the noble Trajan, Emperor,” so Dante scrutinizes, “and clinging to his bridle as she wept [was] a wretched widow, carved in lines of grief … .That poor widow amid the mass of

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shapes seemed to be saying: ‘Lord, avenge my son who has been killed; my heart is cut with grief ’”—to which, in Dante’s eyes, Trajan seems to be responding, “You will have to wait for my return” (Purg. x.76–84). This dynamic feast of carvings illuminates a common thread looping through the Comedy, Treherne argues: “the difficulty of interpretation of signs” and, ergo, of the acquisition of sacramental understanding (“Ekphrasis” 192). These are key, Treherne insists, to the Pilgrim’s progress toward God. Like those penitents on the Terrace of Pride, who have been able to raise their heads to experience the Eucharist-like carvings, the worthy followers of Dante are those “pochi che drizzaste il collo/per tempo al pan de li angeli” [few that reached out early for the angels’ bread] (Par. II. 10–11). For those who have not partaken of the bread of angels, reading the text will be dangerous and foolhardy. (192)

The ensuing cantos (xi–xv) unequivocally nod as well to Eucharistic prefiguration, most notably in the form of manna. In Canto xi—and in an act of exegetical expansion that was not at all exceptional during the Middle Ages (Benfell 111)—Dante rewrites the Pater Noster, the Lord’s Prayer, replacing its Vulgate reference to the daily bread—“panem mostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie (give us this day our daily bread)”—with “[d]a oggi a noi la cotidiana manna (present us with our daily manna)” (Treherne, “Ekphrasis” 189). “Give us this day our daily manna, Lord,” exhorts the Poet, “without it, those most eager to advance go backwards through this wild wasteland of ours” (Purg. xi.13–15). Not only, in this way, is the Old Testament recalled, Exodus in particular; and not only is Exodus rendered ahistorically correspondent with Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as recorded in the New Testament (Matt. 6); so, too, is the Catholic Mass summoned—in no small measure because the Mass, as Watt argues, provides “the liturgical preparation for the celebration of the Eucharist” (134). Benfell goes even further in identifying correlations between Dante’s re-envisioned prayer and the Eucharist: Aquinas, for example, drawing on Augustine … argues that “Panem nostrum cotidianum” refers primarily to the Eucharist, the sacramental bread of life— literally Christ himself—that provides us with essential spiritual nourishment. Dante incorporates this interpretation directly into his prayer, translating the neutral panem of the Vulgate with the theologically charged manna, referring not only to the nourishment miraculously provided to the children of Israel as they wandered in the barren margins of the promised land, but also to the way that Jesus refers to this “bread of heaven” in the sixth chapter of John’s

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Gospel, where he spiritualizes the manna and identifies himself as the “living bread” of the Lord’s Prayer with this Eucharistic meaning, thus emphasizing the necessity of the bread of life, for even the souls on Mount Purgatory not only fail to advance but actually fall back without the grace offered by and through Christ. (117)

Curiously, but surely not unconnectedly, John Lydgate’s early fifteenth-century Procession of Corpus Christi, originally published in his Mummings and Entertainments, also references manna in a manner that weds it expressly to the Eucharist: “This bred of lyfe yee kepe in remembraunce/Oute of this Egipte of worldely grevaunce,/Youre restoratyf celestyal manna,/Of which God graunt eternal suffysaunce/Where aungels sing everlasting Osanna.” Upon our ascension to the Second Terrace, in Canto xiii, we find yet another sacramental prefiguration, this time via a more concrete allusion to the marriage at Cana. “‘Vinum non habent’ [They have no wine],” says the voice of an unseen spirit flying past the Pilgrim. These are the words spoken by Mary to her son at that wedding, and to which Christ famously replied, “My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). Thus, once again, Christ’s time on earth—a time that precedes the Church but also foreordains it—is what Dante appears to be accentuating here. Consider, additionally, Canto xv, in which Virgil urges the Pilgrim to forge on toward Beatrice in spite of the multiple P’s still scarring his forehead: “Strive hard for the quick disappearance now of the five wounds that suffering will heal, just as the other two have left no trace” (Purg. xv.79–81). It seems untenable that medieval Christians would have failed to conjure the five piercing wounds which the incarnate Christ received while crucified. Dante, once more is gradually, though never prescriptively, accenting Christ’s terrestrial history. Also of note is that this canticle possesses “more occurrences of ‘appearing’ (in both senses of the word) than any other canto in the Comedy” (Saiber 152). Here, as Arielle Saiber presciently observes, parere and apparire take on a double meaning. The Pilgrim encounters phenomena that simultaneously are and seem, the real and the virtual. As he did when he first encountered Beatrice [in the Vita Nuova], Dante both marvels at a divine appearance and is baffled by what this vision seems to be (VN II). It becomes clear as Dante ascends to the seat of God that the truly real is the virtual. (152)

Saiber’s assertions appear especially salient when one approaches Dante’s poem from a Eucharistic vantage point. The Eucharist is, after all, though it never is so visibly. To quote Augustine, “one thing is seen” in the sacraments,

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“but another is understood” (“Early”). What we have here, in short—as we will have with even more gusto in the ensuing canto—is an allusive commentary on the limits of reason in matters of faith. Shades of this may exist, as well, in the opening lines of Canto xv, where, in describing the movement of the sun, Dante makes use of the word spera, which indicates all of these: “[w]heel, spiral, mirror, globe, celestial sphere, light, sun” (Saiber 154). If in choosing spera, “Dante wished us to think in terms of its multiple meanings” (154), might he have been imaginatively planting in his readers’ minds an expectation of their reaching, in due course, that to which the entire Mass is dedicated: the spherical, circular, and (in the plastic arts, certainly) light-projecting sacramental wafer? This possibility is especially intriguing on account of the ceremonial atmosphere of the next canto. Here, the Wrathful, who reside in an eye-stingingly thick and unremittingly belched smoke, are praying to “the Lamb of God Who takes away our sins” (Purg. xvi.17–18). These lines from the Agnus Dei prayer, part of the canon of the Mass, were sung at the moment of the fraction of the Host when the priest broke the bread in imitation of Christ at the Last Supper (Palazzo 67). Is this smoke-clotted environs meant sensorily to recall the “incense that wafts over the host before Communion” (just as, later, Dante’s vision of the cross—of the “‘one who was crucified’ [ … Purg. 17:26]”—will connote the approach of the Pilgrim to the altar) (Watt 135)? Certainly, this inaugurates in somewhat electric fashion where we are about to find ourselves, which is at the very center, at the precise midpoint of the Comedy; and when we find ourselves halfway through the fiftieth canto of the 100 that comprise Dante’s poem8, it is Easter Monday, no less. At this charged junction, we are informed that there are two roads from which we can choose, one that is of this world, and the other that is the way to God. (Dante proceeds to lambaste the Church of present-day Rome for having contemptibly elected for the former.) But as Marco the Lombard, one of this smoke-filled realm’s souls, has already explained (this he did on the heels of Dante’s lament that the world is “swarming with evils” (Purg. xvi. 60)), … You men on earth attribute everything to the spheres’ influence alone, as if with some predestined plan they moved all things. If this were true, then our Free Will would be annihilated: it would not be just to render bliss for good or pain for evil. The spheres initiate your tendencies: not all of them—but even if they did, you have the light that shows you right from wrong, and your Free Will, which, though it may grow faint in its first struggles with the heavens, can still surmount all obstacles if nurtured well … (Purg. xvi.67–78)

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With these words—and felicitous geometric precision, at that—Dante has made free will the epicenter of his poem. One has freedom of choice, either to take up or to refuse the path to God. Choosing the path to God of course mandates “an act of faith in the omnipresence and omniscience of [the] Creator,” as Groeschel and Monti express; and so, to say that the “experience of Divine Presence is an act of faith” is also to say that it is an act of decision or will (83). Like his intellectual progenitor Thomas Aquinas, Dante emphatically insisted on freedom of the will, as, without it, the reality of the moral life would evaporate, as would, too, the feasibility of rewards and punishments; indeed, the very possibility of divine justice would perish (Wicksteed 190). The French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), whom we will later meet in Paradise, expressed a similar sentiment a century earlier. In his treatise De gratia, Bernard illustrated, via the following image, his conception of the will’s working: Able to go in either direction, [the will] is, as it were, on the sloping side of a fairly steep mountain. It is so weakened by its desires by the flesh that only with the Spirit constantly helping its infirmity through grace is it capable of righteousness (which, to quote the Prophet [Psalm 36:6], is like the mountains of God), capable of ascending from strength to strength right up to the summit. (qtd. in Tamburello 52)

By no means is this perceived freedom of the will exclusive to the Middle Ages, especially when it comes to its relationship to the Eucharist. In contemporary times, for instance, we find Archbishop Augustine Di Noia asserting in a 2010 article on Eucharistic adoration and political responsibility how “Christ shows us that, since we are persons, and precisely as persons, we must freely embrace the personal communion that is offered to us by the triune God as our ultimate good and perfect happiness. Christ’s grace empowers us to do so, but it empowers us to do so freely” (emphases added). My aim is not merely to stress free will’s significance to Eucharistic adoration, nor to indicate the fairly conspicuous correspondences between Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory and Bernard’s will as facing a sheer mountainside. Equally relevant is the historically-documented Cathar rejection of the concept of free will. To the Cathars, who were dualists, Christ was all spirit, pure and necessarily unblemished by the rot, stink, and seepage, and the degenerative nature of human flesh.9 As a result, Dante’s suggestive commentary may well have struck his medieval audiences as an assertion against those very heretics who had been a decisive impetus for the ecclesiastical institution of the Corpus Christi feast. At the least, the Pilgrim—and, by proxy, his reader—is now suitably prepared for a new “moto spiritale,” for a movement grounded in

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faith rather than understanding (Fergusson 109). Alas, it is also one that Virgil, as an antecedent of Christ, will be incapable of consummating: “I can explain to you as much as reason sees,” Virgil tells his charge when asked to expound on the subject of love. “[F]or the rest, wait for Beatrice—it is the work of faith” (Purg. xviii.46–48). What Dante is here doing—and “with the most delicate and tender discriminations,” as Fergusson waxes—is synchronously “building up and dissolving the well-loved authority of Virgil’s pagan school” (88). But Dante is also, it need be noted, indicating this moto spiritale by sensuous metaphors which are quite different from the imagery of light and dark which dominates the end of the second Day. The most important are the metaphors of eating and drinking; of nourishment, fattening, and thinning, based on analogies between the appetites of the spirit and the classic appetites of the flesh for money, food, and erotic satisfaction. (Fergusson 109, emphases added)

Watt suggests that such appetites are meant to contrast with the mad flight of Ulysses, of which we are reminded via a dream the Pilgrim has in Canto xix. Now, argues Watt, Dante hungers “not for knowledge but for the flesh of Christ, present in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist mystery” (136). A vivid example of this yen for a more spiritual food appears in Dante’s description of himself climbing the mountain and freeing himself, therefore, from “that ageless sorceress” (as Virgil calls the siren-hag who infected Dante’s dream): “The hawk who has been staring at its feet will, when he hears the cry, stretch wide his wings ready to soar toward food he knows is there; I did the same: I strained to reach the end of the ascending passage in the rock, and enter on another circling ledge” (Purg. xix.58, 64–69). If Dante is metaphorically approaching an altar, his doing so is “strongly signaled by the prostration of the sinners uttering the ritual ‘My soul cleaves to the dust’” as he makes his way (Watt 137). Thus has Dante “placed the love of Christ, like an unseen magnet, behind the ‘new thirst’ which drives the Pilgrim here” (Fergusson 114, emphasis added). We might accordingly reverse Augustine’s apothegm, which earlier I quoted (about one thing being seen and another understood) to suggest that for something to be understood, it ought not to be seen. Recall Paul’s definition of faith, after all: “For faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen … Through faith we understand that the world was framed by the word of God, so that the things that are seen were made of things that are not seen (Heb. 11.1–3)” (qtd. in Durling, “Farinata” 33). The relevance of this imperceptibility vis-à-vis the Eucharist will be brought explicitly to the fore upon our reaching Paradise. For now, we remain in a realm

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more “terrestrial,” beholden to Christ as present on earth—both when he took human form and as he is celebrated during Mass, especially on Easter. Indeed, could this help shed light on the plethora of fused allusions to the Easter story, which appear in Cantos xx and xxi? As Watt helpfully elaborates, that story is told “through the Stations of the Cross, which in turn reiterate the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem,” all of which are subtly reinforced through references to Christ’s life, whether these be in the form of the Virgin birth or the angels resultant singing of “Glory to God in the Highest” (137). The bridge alone between these two cantos has Dante referring or alluding “to no less than five Gospel texts” (Hawkins, “Resurrecting” 62). As a result, by the time we reach Canto xxi, Dante has generated a veritable “thicket of scriptural allusions” (Smarr 222). Not only does the mountain he is climbing tremble (as happened at Christ’s death); additionally, he hears the “tremendous shout of Gloria” (as at Christ’s birth) and experiences an intense desire to comprehend what is transpiring (which he himself likens to the thirst of the Samaritan woman, whom Christ met at a well) (222). Following this, in an attempt to describe his shock at the sudden appearance of a shade, Dante self-reflexively calls upon Luke’s description of Christ: “haste was urging me along the crowded path … when suddenly—just as we read in Luke that Christ, new-risen from the tomb, appeared to the two men on the Emmaus road—a shade appeared!” (Purg. xxi.4–8). Thus, we find within a very short span, not only multiple references to Christ’s life but to all the major moments of his life: “his birth, his recognition as prophet and savior, his death, and his resurrection” (Smarr 222–223). In this way, Dante creatively ratifies his “shift of hopes from philosophy to theology” (223),10 all the while keeping emphasis on Christ’s historical narrative. To be sure, this dovetails with a different sort of shift, one expressly the result of Christ’s time on earth. For now, the Virgilian realm of paganism must give way to Christianity—and so, by no accident, the character-cum-shade of Statius appears. This converging triptych of personalities, this moment when Statius, Virgil, and Dante cross paths, reflects “that great watershed of time and human history when the pagan ages ended and the age of Christianity began” (Fergusson 121). Statius, after all, is the ancient Roman poet who, purportedly upon reading Virgil, converted to Christianity. Although no evidence for such a conversion exists, Statius’ reading of Virgil through a Christian lens conforms to the allegorical interpretation of Virgil’s fourth eclogue accepted during Dante’s time. That is, a mere forty years before Christ’s actual birth, Virgil announced the arrival of “a new progeny from heaven,” and this became popularly interpreted as a prophecy of Christ’s coming (Kleinhenz, “Canto xxii” 243). Statius will, in

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fact, be the one to reveal to Dante the precise meaning of the baffling events that have only just transpired: the earthquake (it signaled Statius’ soul’s own release from his penance) and the cry of Gloria (a mirror of what had occurred at Christ’s birth). In this way, as Hawkins keenly observes, Statius will assist Dante in ascertaining “that the ‘nature’ of Purgatory has primarily to do with the spirit and not ‘flesh’” (“Resurrecting” 63). (Statius will accompany the Pilgrim all the way to Earthly Paradise at the canticle’s end.) Given Statius’ ability to slake Dante’s thirst for knowledge, not to mention his pedagogical disposition, one might theorize, as Robert Hollander does, that Statius is the risen Christ’s “figural messenger” (qtd. in Hawkins, “Resurrecting” 67)—or, as per Hawkins, that Statius is “playing the role of Christ” (“Resurrecting” 66). Then there is Janet Smarr, who observes that just as Christ appeared risen from the sepulchral hole, so too has Statius’ soul risen surprisingly from a deathlike condition of immobility with fact to the ground, indeed from the death of sin, to an erect ascent into beatitude. What could be more surprising to reason or human experience than this rising from death into a new life? (224)

This poetically bold reversal on the part of Dante—whereby Christ’s death renders a birth (Hawkins, “Resurrecting” 64)—can, and indeed almost demands, I would venture, to be read Eucharistically. The Host is, of course, the epicenter of the Catholic faith, and the “birth” Catholics are offered via Christ’s death and resurrection; but here, the fusion of Christ’s birth, death and terrestrial reappearance “in the flesh” (as witnessed by his apostles) is predominantly making earnest way for the celestial Christ—for that Christ who resides in Paradise and whose return to Catholic-kind is as sacramental flesh. If Purgatory is “the ideal Church of Christ,” as Sinclair argues (Dante’s Purgatorio 279), Paradise, we might tender, is the abode of its raison d’être, the Eucharist. Of consequence to this reading is the fruit-laden tree that Statius and Virgil approach in Canto xxii, with its fiat to them, “You may not eat of this food” (Purg. xxii.141, trans. Sinclair). True, we are now among gluttons who need to cultivate temperance—and so, the tree’s ensuing recitation of how, at the wedding feast of Cana, the Virgin Mary satisfied the guests more than she did her own mouth. These trees cannot be univocally interpreted, however, as numerous scholars wisely advise. The trees can just as well signify “man’s original disobedience, Eve’s sampling of the apple,” or Christ’s redemptive suffering on the cross (Fergusson 136–137). One wonders, in fact, if the tree’s food cannot yet be approached because of its historic and ritual affiliation with the cross of

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Christ. Is this not, after all, the very nature of the purgatorial journey, in that the natural and historical are gradually and complexly giving way to both the super-natural and supra-historical? In other words, it is not yet time for our Pilgrim—let alone, we readers—to gain access to that “bread of angels” (a term that will be enunciated only in Paradise). Due diligence of both the theological and spiritual sort is first in order. Keep in mind, too, that by the time we reach this canto’s end, with its squabbling tree, we will have already been confronted many times with contrasts “between material and spiritual nourishment” (Kleinhenz, “Canto xxii” 248); and given that the canticle culminates with Dante’s account of the terrestrial Eden, the meta-message—one of them, at least—seems clear: ultimately we are preparing for, to import Auerbach’s language, that sacrament “in which the mysteries of human nourishment are contained” (qtd. in Fergusson 141). Perhaps this elucidates the intriguingly repeated allusions in Canto xxii to thirst or, on occasion, to a dearth of wine. For instance, the canto opens with a beatitudinal reference to thirsting after righteousness (l. 5), while a few tercets later, Mary’s worry at the wedding at Cana about having no wine is broached (ll. 42–44). The canto closes with an encomium to John the Baptist, whose greatness—at least in the Lukan lines from which Dante’s own derive—stems from his abstention from wine and strong drink (Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 292). To be sure, this motif is meant to echo the hunger and thirst through which these (currently) gluttonous shades are eventually to “regain … their holiness” (Purg. xxiii.66, trans. Sinclair 299); but it might just as well explain why in this, and the next, canto we find references to open lips (xxiv.38–39); and to Erysicthon, who, being insatiably hungry, ate his own flesh (xxiii.25–27); and to a Jewess named Miriam who purportedly ate her own child during Jerusalem’s siege (xxiii.28–30). Such cautionary tales are, again, indubitably intended to warn this realm’s sin-purging inhabitants of their need to starve their way to holiness. On the other hand, Dante repeatedly correlates the themes of hunger and food with Christ’s crucifixion. Consider what Forese Donati, a one-time friend of Dante’s, exclaims regarding what the forbidden fruit of this mountainside does to his emaciated state: The fragrance of the fruit and of the spray that trickles down the leaves stirs up in us a hungering desire for food and drink—and not just once: as we go running round this road, our pain is constantly renewed. Did I say pain? Solace is what I mean! For that same will that leads us to the tree led Christ to cry out joyously, “Eli,”11 when he delivered us with His own blood. (Purg. xxiii.61–75)

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Given the nature of Dante’s overt analogizing here, it is worth our attending to his notable reference earlier to the “omo in the face of men” (Purg. xxiii.32)— that is, to those letters o-m-o, which are evident in the physiognomy of man, in his two eyes and nose, as if God had signed his own creation (man is literally omo in Italian). For, might this not likewise be a veiled reference to the historical Christ? It comes quite on the heels of the soliloquy, after all, that Dante’s shriveled friend of yore delivers. Pain, in this way, is at every step intertwined with solace, just as humankind’s deliverance is fundamentally intertwined with Christ’s bodily demise. We could also argue, as Watt does, that the Pilgrim is thereby being prepared “for the feast of Christ’s flesh” (138). (Recall that she associates the movement through Purgatory with that through a church, such that Dante and his cohorts are evermore approaching the altar.) In fact, the emaciation of the gluttons recalls, for Watt, the medieval fasting that necessarily preceded receipt of the Host (138). She is not alone in finding sacramental significance in these purgatorial quarters either. Treherne equally considers the Eucharist to be relevant to the central dynamic playing out on the terrace of gluttony—via a desirably depicted “rejection of attachment of contingent goods for their own sake in favor of the source of being” (“Liturgical” 146). While the Eucharist is not named directly, he concedes, the allusions to it “are strikingly consistent in linking the sacrament to the condition of createdness” (146).

The cross at the altar If the sacramental motif wanes for a period in Purgatory, it incontestably rebounds with Dante’s approach and entry into Earthly Paradise. Needless to say—although Eleanor Cook does say it—here, the “biblical allusions multiply” (98). They also do so in ways that are, perhaps not surprisingly, “twofold or threefold,” pointing not only back to the Old Testament but as well, via the Gospels, “toward the end of time” (98). No biblical allusion is perhaps more discernible than that housed in Virgil’s promise to Dante that the “sweet fruit which the concern of mortals seeks on so many branches will today set your hungers at rest” (qtd. in Singleton, Dante 2 102). The word for fruit in the original, pome, is the same word used to identify the fruit on the gluttons’ terrace, and also the apple eaten by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Stambler 236). Nevertheless, if Dante is on this day to enter that Garden and, as Stambler proposes, “have his hunger satisfied,” it will only be “to the extent that the Earthly Paradise is capable of satisfying” (236). Still, it might

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behoove us to propose that, in once again multiplying his allusions, Dante is gesturing tacitly toward that Fruit that will satisfy. Another biblical allusion of a threefold nature can be found in the wall of fire through which our journeymen must pass in order to reach the Earthly Paradise. Not only does that fire recall Moses’ transfiguration after his encounter with the burning bush but also the Jews’ entry into the Promised Land and, later, into that holy city of Jerusalem, where Christ will preach, and break bread, and be crucified. Indeed, Dante’s passage through the fire becomes unambiguously Christian, a “fulfillment of the paschal drama,” what with the shouts of “Hosanna” that greet him on his arrival, recalling Christ’s own entry into Jerusalem for the Passover celebration (Watt 59–60). In this way, Purgatory’s earthly paradise operates as a sort of “way station,” as Watt metonymically describes, one “from which the Christian soul can ascend to its celestial counterpart, the City of God, heavenly paradise” (60). Watt’s comparison of Purgatory’s Earthly Paradise to a way station arguably reinforces my assertion that Dante conceives Purgatory as a locus betwixt and between the entirely flesh and the entirely divine—and, so, the locus primarily of Christ Incarnate. Her comparison also materially accents the doublings so pronounced in this canticle. By no means am I alone in pointing to an integral profusion of dualisms in Earthly Paradise, nor in recommending that they are, at every turn, working to represent, and in some sense replicate, the dual nature of Christ on earth. We might even propose that, through them, we are not dealing with Christ’s bodily presence, as that can only be accomplished postincarnationally via the Eucharist; rather, what we have here are reflections of Christ, Christ as mediated. Hence, the multiple pairings at this juncture of the poem: of Leah and Rachel, about whom Dante dreams (and who are believed to represent the Active and Contemplative life of the Soul); and later of Matilda and Beatrice (whom Leah and Rachel prefigure). Victoria Kirkham discerns that these “dualities” filter even into Dante’s “twofold landscape, a garden bisected by two rivers” 315). The dualities additionally appear, as we shall later explore, in that creature of the Griffin so central to the impending pageant and one whose bipartite nature (part eagle, part lion) underscores the “God-made paradox” that two-ness, for Kirkham, indicates (315). Interestingly, when Dante enters the Sacred Wood of Earthly Paradise, the garden he describes is said to be reminiscent of Ravenna’s Byzantine church, Sant’Apollinare in Classe (Watt 141). If at first glance this appears a hollow correspondence, recall that Dante refers expressly in his description to Classe and to the winds that rustle through its pines. In fact, once the barrier into Earthly Paradise has been crossed—which, according to Watt, signals a kind of

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arrival at the altar—“the resemblance to the churches of Ravenna becomes even more acute. The altar is, after all, the entryway to heaven. It signals communion with Christ … It is the earthly Jerusalem from which the journey to the heavenly Jerusalem begins” (141). On the other hand, we might posit that this is, more accurately, a communion with mediated incarnations of earthbound Christ, from which the journey to the heavenly realm—and to Christ as Flesh—will begin. If so, it is only logical that Dante would, in front of this meta-textual altar, be conferred with a bishop’s authority (even if Virgil, oddly, is the one to crown and miter him). Indeed, Virgil renders the Pilgrim lord of himself in precisely the same location where coronations took place, as anything beyond that—the choir, the sanctuary—was space into which the layperson could not enter (140–141).12 This, then, is the very place whence the enduring presence of Christ was ritually commemorated and his second coming “anticipated in the Eucharist mystery” (140). Hence Virgil’s poignant admission (not to mention, his final words) that they have “reached the place where my discernment now has reached its end” (Purg. xxvii.128–129). From hereon in, in other words, Reason is entirely insufficient. To approach any closer, to pass into the sanctuary that is Paradise, Faith—a willing participation in a moto spiritale—is required. Some critics allege that the grand and dazzling Heavenly Pageant that follows, and which Dante describes in lush detail, is the central event not only of Purgatory but of the Comedy as a whole (Collins 120). Jacoff, for one, describes the “highly stylized allegorical procession” that leads up to Canto xxx as the “structure and emotional center of the Comedy” (“Canto xxx” 341). The procession is also representative, she says, of “a book within a book: Scripture [is] portrayed as a processional of its component texts,” with the “complex allegorical dumb show, which concludes the sequence, offer[ing] a capsule history of the Church” (341). So steeped is this theo-mystical procession in polysemic medieval Christian symbolism, in fact—some of it probably escaping us today—that its every component has been critically parsed, speculated upon, debated, argued over, then revisited anew and interpretively recast. Now, one must wrestle with a bevy of religious interpretations, some of them entirely incongruous. Perhaps that is possible only because, as H. Wayne Storey maintains, Dante’s adaptation of symbolism in this procession was not designed to entertain some sort of theological debate: Instead, as he does in so many other passages of the Divine Comedy, Dante uses symbols well-known to his medieval audience as a support structure for his own poetic and moral goals. As the poet himself reminds us in [Canto xxxii], he

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is the imperfect scribe and informant of this episode, described very much in artistic rather than religious terms. (“Canto xxxii” 364)

While Dante may not decode his own imagery, he does, so Hawkins observes, provide us with “strong iconographic clues” (Dante 48).13 Perhaps, at this juncture, it would help were I to summarize the procession as it passes—or, rather, to “crib” advantageously from Ciardi’s descriptions, as well as from his interpretation of the various symbols, which we shall then complicate on the other end. In short, after hearing a sweet melody and espying a glorious light—which provoke Dante’s verbal assail of Eve for denying humankind such joy today on earth—Dante sees the Heavenly Pageant approach, with “Hosanna!” ringing free on the air. Seven gold candelabra are followed by twenty-four elders (who personify the books of the Old Testament) and four beasts (personifying the four Gospels). These guard a chariot (representative of the Church)14 that is being drawn by a Griffin (Christ). Surrounding the chariot are the various virtues (both theological and cardinal), behind whom stream the elders Luke and Paul (as the author of Acts and the fourteen epistles, respectively); four more elders, James, Peter, John, and Jude (authors of the four Catholic epistles); and single elder John (author of Revelation).15 At the sound of a thunderclap, the entire procession comes to a halt, directly across from where Dante is standing. Picking up that “halt” in Canto xxx, the Poet begins with the prophets thrice singing in the direction of the chariot, “Come, my bride, from Lebanon.” (According to Dunbar, this is suggestive of a rubric mandating that a priest kiss the altar three times “in reference to the two natures of Christ, and to his marriage with that church in which are united Jew and Gentile” (319).) Left of the chariot, half-disguised by flowers being showered upon her by a hundred angels, is that “bride,” Beatrice. Stirred by the vision, Dante turns to his classical Muse—only to discover Virgil gone. Dante’s burst into tears prompts an immediate reprimand from Beatrice, who explains that Virgil’s presence “would violate the ordering of the Divine Decree … to let Dante drink the waters of the Lethe” (Ciardi 546). No one, after all, can enter Heaven “save through the Crucified,” as written in John 10:1 (qtd. in Bonaventure, Journey). Perhaps we need pause to give Beatrice her historical due, given that no other personage in Dante’s oeuvre “has received so much attention and so many different interpretations from the Dante scholars” (Collins 113). She has been said, collectively, to embody Divine Wisdom, Divine Love, Scripture, Grace,

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Faith, Theology, Revelation, the Church; and more particularly, even, the Church as Bride; and even acts (as Singleton argues) “as Christ” (Dante Studies I 52). Very possibly, Beatrice is all these things—or, at the least, like dappling light on water, narratively mutates from one to other—fulfilling one Dantean reading or role before taking on another. How else to convey in literature a figure like Christ, who was understood not only to be giver but gift; to be priest but also victim (Fisher 111)? If this is the case, though, we need wonder, much as William Anderson does, “Can she with all these allusive meanings still be the soul of Beatrice Portinari,” that young woman about whom Dante wrote with such worshipful affection in his Vita Nuova (371)? True, the Vita Nuova’s alternating love poems and diary-like prose have themselves been variously interpreted as historical biography, as religious or Christological allegory, even as a meditation on poetry (Musa xvi–xvii). We need not choose; but we do well to remember Beatrice’s own mention in Purgatory of how, when she was alive, her face had sustained Dante (“letting him see my young eyes, I guided him turned in the right direction”); once dead, however, Dante “turned his steps along an untrue way” (qtd. in Singleton, Dante Studies I 53–54).16 As for the processing characters who herald Beatrice (the elders, the beasts), their service as representatives of terrestrial authors or books that disseminate God’s Word is hard to miss. At the same time, they drive home the extent to which, for medieval Christians, “the Bible was as much an event as a book” (Hawkins, Dante 49). And if its presentation here feels timeless—or, perhaps more precisely, encompassing all of time—Bonaventure’s words may have had some bearing on that. For, as he writes with respect to Scripture’s breadth, “it begins with the commencement of the world and of time, in the beginning of Genesis, and extends to the end of the world and of time, namely, to the end of the Apocalypse” (qtd. in Hawkins, Dante 58). No wonder, then, that any decisive interpretation of Dante’s procession may be impossible. For, while the Griffin and his chariot could be a symbolic stand-in for the throne and Lamb of Revelation as envisioned by John, the chariot may just as well be recalling “Ezekiel’s complicated vision of wheels”—with the two wheels illustrating the Jews and the Gentiles, and the seven-branched candelabra, the Jewish menorah (Armour, “Canto xxix” 333). We might query with similar vacillation: Is the chariot possibly “a caroroccio, the war chariot or, more generally, the ceremonial vehicle of the medieval Italian city-state” (333), or is it the Synagogue, which, at a thunderclap, is transformed into the Church, as one early commentator, Francesco da Buti, recommended? (This he adduced because the Church hadn’t existed before the coming of Christ.)17

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Other etiological forces at work further confound the picture. Some commentators, for example, attest that the hieratic figures comprising this cortege can be found in “the iconographic programs of specific churches in Ravenna, Anagni, and Rome” (Hawkins, Dante 49). Another correspondence observed by several scholars (e.g., Fisher; Reynolds; Sayers; Sinclair) is especially vital, if we accept—even if only provisionally—that the Eucharist is one of the structuring principles of Dante’s poem. Here I am speaking of the procession’s likeness to what was, in Dante’s time, part of the recently authorized feast of Corpus Christi (49)—the feast, in other words, of the Body of Christ. The first procession of the Eucharist of which we are historically aware—this being an eleventh-century precursor to the Corpus Christi feast—was arranged for Palm Sunday by Lanfranc, that aforementioned adversary of Berengar (Moloney 122). Lanfranc, to reprise, had led the battle against Berengar, who had denied the doctrine of the Real Presence. Lanfranc’s institution of a forerunner to the Corpus Christi feast is said to mark “one of the defining moments in the history of Eucharistic adoration” (Groeschel and Monti 201). Whereas, before, a Gospel Book or effigy of Christ on a donkey had been carried as a sign of “Christ,” now—and “in what must have been to the people of the time a powerful new affirmation of the doctrine of the Real Presence”—the Eucharist was exhibited and made devotion’s focus (201). If those earlier processions represented an older perception of the Eucharist, as Rubin argues (Corpus 245), they must have nonetheless rendered the processioning of the Host a familiar phenomenon, one that helped to “prepare the minds of the faithful for the procession which was to become a permanent feature of the festum Eucharistiae” (Snoek 263). It was in 1264, to refresh the reader’s memory—one year prior to Dante’s birth—that the actual feast of Corpus Christi was prescribed by Pope Urban iv for the Church at large (Kilmartin 153).18 Its origins purportedly lay in the extraordinary visions of a Belgian Augustinian nun, Juliana of Cornillon (1192– 1258), whose particular apparition “of a full moon darkened in one spot” was read as symbolic testament to a “feast missing in the liturgical calendar, namely a great celebration in honor of the Body of Christ” (Groeschel and Monti 126). Urban IV, in his bull on the feast, exhorts, “Let faith sing psalms, let hope dance, let charity exult” (qtd. in Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 415)—echoed perhaps, in those three maiden representatives of the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, whom Dante descries “circling in a dance” (Purg. xxix.121). According to tradition,19 Urban IV entrusted Thomas Aquinas with assembling the office for the feast. In order to render the difficult “new theology” of transubstantiation accessible as well as to unambiguously certify its association with “traditional

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biblical and patristic concepts” (Kilmartin 153), Thomas produced several hymns: Pange lingua (Sing, My Tongue), Sacris solemniis (At This Our Solemn Feast), and Verbum supernum (The Word from Above). Innumerable paeans to the bread’s sacramental nature are additionally present in the liturgy he composed for the feast. Given that Christ is the bread of life according to John’s gospel, the fact Dante links Purgatory so transparently to the Exodus may, in some respects, be for the purposes of heralding Christ as the figural fulfillment of the manna received by the Hebrews when wandering in the desert. In the next chapter, we shall engage more in depth with John’s gospel and also with the philosophy that Thomas advanced—both simply but delicately in his hymns and systematically, if drily, in his scholastic writings. Although the feast’s promotion diminished soon after Urban IV’s death, which was also in 1264, John XXII reconfirmed endorsement of it in 1317 (Little 34). This is precisely the time when Dante would have been completing his epic poem (its years of composition are said to span 1308–1321). Even during the feast’s supposed institutionally “inactive” period, however, its spread continued “by way of individual bishops, religious orders (including the Dominicans, with whom Dante would have been familiar), and personal contacts among bishops and laity” (34–35). Its celebration during Dante’s lifetime is recorded as having taken place in Venice (35); and, in the year Dante presumably finished his Comedy, the Franciscans, with whom he is believed to have had deep associations, became the first religious order legislatively to stipulate celebration of the Corpus Christi feast (Groeschel and Monti 227). Dante, Little argues, had “been born into the middle of the Eucharistic fervor” (35).20 The 1264 miracle ultimately responsible for spurring Urban IV’s establishment of the feast occurred in Bolsena, Italy, it bears repeating, as Bolsena lies some 100 miles south of Florence. If during the feast, “all of the signs of a ‘royal progress’ were displayed to salute the presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament” (Groeschel and Monti 127), that was because one of its objectives was to show the triumph of the Church as “centered in the glorification of the eucharist” (101). Some scholars defensibly argue that the pageantry now identified with the Corpus Christi feast was less innovation than elaboration, and—more debilitating for us—that the feast was too new in Dante’s time to have made it into his poetic program (see Fisher 95). Medieval manuscripts make it fairly transparent, however, that, by the middle of the thirteenth century, processions centering on the Host were commonplace. Popes were already accustomed to having “the host carried before them on journeys and state occasions, and the viaticum was carried to the sick in a procession with lights and bells” (Fisher 95). These existing rites and rituals

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were later adopted into the feast of Corpus Christi—as was, too, what would lie at the heart of the pageant: the Host under its canopy. In the context of Dante’s pageant, this is—at least, for Fisher—the symbolic import of “the veiled figure of Beatrice” (106). As Fisher waxes, Beatrice “appears in the midst as suddenly and as silently as the sacramental presence of Christ comes to the altar at the words of consecration” (106).21 Naturally, one must ask, continues Fisher, why Dante’s lost love should return to him as the main figure of this triumph of Christian worship, enthroned within the church, hailed as is the miracle of transubstantiation, honored, as is the host, in solemn procession? Why, indeed, if not to show at the outset her visible return that she is now and hereafter not the lost love but the mystic Beatrice, divinely appointed agent of Dante’s salvation and enlightenment? (Fisher 106)

Of course, we might advocate with a slightly different spin that, much in the way Exodus ripples through this canticle, a fortunate exodus from the trap of the human body, is here being heralded, given that one was thought not to ascend to heaven in fleshy robes. In this case, the procession possibly—more profoundly, even—reflects one of the precursors of the Corpus Christi feast: the viaticum, when the Eucharist, as part of last rites, was taken in procession to the dying. While this may seem on the surface a peculiar (and possibly morbid) supposition, keep in mind that we are, in this canticle, as much being metaphorically freed of our bodily substance in order to reach Heaven as we are mourning the disappearance of Virgil. We are gratefully celebrating the passing of pre-Christian times, because those times are what gave way to the time of Christ’s birth—and death—and so too, to the birth of the Church and the Christian era. According to Giuseppe Mazzotta, “For Dante the Incarnation remains the pivot of history, the event that inaugurates the eschata which the Church embodies” (7). Or, in another turn of phrase, Purgatory’s pageant, in gradually unrolling its length before Dante, presents “the coming of Revelation in history” (Ralphs 185). The procession of biblical writers, according to this reading, is ergo “a representation of the Church Militant”—Christ on earth— as distinct from the Church Triumphant, which Dante will encounter in Paradise (32).22 To be sure, this helps to elucidate the resurrection-of-the-body theme so prevalent in these cantos (32), and which, in my mind, is meant to signal the forthcoming segue from Christ’s literal, earthly time (in the flesh) to his heavenly rise and subsequent sacramental return to earth. Fascinating correlations are to be found, moreover, if one is open to Eucharistic interpretation, between Dante’s procession and the medieval liturgical mystery plays that became widespread in the tenth and eleventh

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centuries. These plays, in their incipient form, generally revolved around the cross as a cultic object (venerated on Palm Sunday), which was then hidden in the tomb (on Good Friday), only to have vanished from it (on Easter morning) (Mitchell 133). By the end of the tenth century, however, “the Good Friday depositio and the Easter Sunday visitatio (or elevatio) [were] beginning to center on the Blessed Sacrament as the cultic object ‘buried’ and then ‘resurrected’” (133). A thirteenth-century liturgical directory for the church at Soissons, in northern France, provides actual description of the elaborate ceremony. In Nathan Mitchell’s summation of that description, the church’s ministers would be assigned dramatic roles, such as of the two angels and the three women who first visit the tomb, with the Host functioning as “the central object of attention at the visit to the tomb,” eventually to be “solemnly borne in procession to the main altar of the church” (135). One of the most revealing affiliations may be between Dante’s pageant and that represented in the twelfth-century St. Patrick’s Purgatory. In the latter vision poem, a brave knight, once released from the torments and persecutions of “unclean spirits”—which is to say, demons—approaches a gate that opens, and the smell that greets him is so sweet that swiftly he regains his courage. And what does he witness on the other side of that gate? A procession such as has never been seen in this world, [which] came forth to meet him with crosses, tapers, banners, and branches of golden palm. It was followed by a multitude of men and women of every rank: archbishops, bishops, abbots, monks, priests, and ministers of every ecclesiastical degree, all clad in sacred garments, suited to their ranks. They welcomed the knight with pleasant greetings and led him inside the gate in triumph with concerts of unequalled harmony. (“St Patrick’s” 145)

So far, this may seem descriptively generic enough to fit with any parade during medieval times. But consider the remarks made by the holy pontiffs after showing the knight the delights of their country “of such great beatitude”: “Now, this land is the earthly paradise,” those bishops expound for his benefit, “from which the first man, Adam, was expelled for the sin of disobedience … But our most pious God, moved by goodness, decided that his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, should become incarnate for the sake of the wretchedness of mankind” (“Knight” 515). Even more fascinating are the Eucharistic overtones in what immediately follows this longer dissertation on what inhabitants must do to ascend to paradise. “This,” the pontiffs say, referring to a gate resembling gold glowing in a furnace,

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is the gate of heavenly paradise, through which those of us who are chosen enter heaven. And we must also let you know that once a day the Lord feeds us with celestial food. Soon, by gift of God, you will see what this food is like and how delicious it is when you taste it with us.” This speech was barely finished when something like a flame of fire came down from the sky and covered the whole land. And, separating as if into rays, it came down over everyone’s head and finally entered completely into them. It even came down over the knight among the others and entered into him. From it he felt such a delicious sweetness both in his heart and his body that he was hardly able to make out whether he was alive or dead, so extreme was the sweetness. But this hour also passed quickly. “This is the food,” they said, “with which once a day, as we were saying, God feeds us. But those among us who are taken into heaven enjoy this food endlessly.” (“Knight Owein’s” 516)

That the Dantean pageant makes its first appearance in Canto xxix is assuredly also thematically vital. Could it only be chance that the numerically analogous canto in the Inferno belongs to the Alchemists, those folks who, in life, had acted “as perverted priests, appropriating that sacred power to appear to transubstantiate dung into gold” (Hoffman 57)? Recall that they were being punished for altering the exterior of things in order “to cloak [their] fetid interior”—the very antithesis of the interior miracle performed by priests, who alone can induce a wheaten wafer’s “spiritual conversion,” such that its substance is altered while its accidents remain (57). If Dante has assembled before his Pilgrim “the Word of God made allegorical flesh,” as Hawkins proposes, he has done so, I would say, at a median of sorts—between the sinful, corrupt attempt to transubstantiate shit into gold (which Dante encountered in Hell), and the sacred, sacrificed, transubstantiated Flesh of Christ (which, in the form of the Host, is, of course, not allegorical). And so, in the equally analogous Canto xxiv of Paradise, when Beatrice mentions “the Eternal Goodness that divides Itself into … countless mirrors that reflect Itself, [while still] remaining One, as It was always” (Par. xxiv.143–145), could she be alluding to the Eucharist? Worth our recalling one last time is the Host “under its canopy” which was at the heart of the Corpus Christi pageant (Fisher 105). Is this possibly the mainspring for Beatrice’s appearance as veiled? According to Fisher, Beatrice is the Eucharist—which is why she materializes “as suddenly and silently as the sacramental presence of Christ comes to the altar at the words of consecration. It is for [Beatrice] that the lights blaze, the flowers are strewn, and the great cry of greeting and welcome goes up” (106).23 I must disagree in part with Fisher’s assessment, however; for while there is certainly poetic

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logic in the cannibalistic flesh, so prominent in the last cantos of the Inferno, having correspondences here in Purgatory, where Christ is terrestrially figured, wouldn’t it be equally logical for these correspondences to reach their thematic apogee in Paradise, where Christ is ascendantally figured? Still, transubstantiation’s significance to the pageant is definitely reinforced by the manner in which the earlier processing prophets hail Beatrice’s arrival. They rejoice at her appearance, employing words very much akin to “those sung in the liturgy immediately before the consecration of the host”: Benedictus qui venis (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”) (Jacoff, “Canto xxx” 345).24 Perhaps, then, we might say that Beatrice reflects the very means by which God comes down and “continues to dwell with men” (Fisher 116)? Beatrice launches into an oft-commented-upon chastisement of Dante for his past behaviors. Tonally, she reduces him to the position of a contrite child. But even that infantilizing remonstration is conceivably an important, and even necessary, constituent of Dante’s purgation. With those sins of origin nearly removed—the ones symbolized by the seven P’s originally placed on his forehead—the Pilgrim “has nearly become as a little child that he may enter heaven” (Stambler 230). Dante’s subsequent confession of his faults and solicitation of repentance leave him swooning over his own sins. He wakes to find himself being drawn by the mysterious Matilda25 into the waters of the Lethe. Upon drinking those waters, which erase all memory of sin, and upon receiving absolution from Matilda—who, incidentally, walks on water, thus performing a miracle specifically accredited to Christ (Ciardi 560)—Dante is next led before the Griffin. But prior to our being led with him, it is worth our pausing to consider the preceding, baptismally resonant scene. That before witnessing the Griffin’s twofold nature, the Pilgrim must undergo something akin to confession and baptism may seem unsurprising to many a Catholic. Baptism was—and remains—the only Catholic means of entering “into the life of the Spirit” (Craig 35). In the Gospel of John, Peter impulsively protests having his feet washed by Christ and, to this, Christ replies, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me” (qtd. in Craig 35). Perhaps that is why, in the ancient church, baptism was also incontrovertibly linked to the Host. As the Eucharistic celebration was what ultimately united believers with Christ’s “holy life, death, and resurrection, and especially with His sacrifice on the Cross,” only the baptized were permitted to participate in that reality of Christ’s worship (Groeschel and Monti 47). As early as the first century, Justin Martyr could be found declaring that no one should “share in the Eucharist except those who believe in the truth of our teachings and have been washed in the

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bath which confers forgiveness of sins and rebirth, and who live according to Christ’s commands” (qtd. in Gaudoin-Parker 15). John Lydgate, citing Paul, would emphatically warn in his Procession of Corpus Christi that “Y if there beo founden any creature/Which that this bred receyvethe unworthely,/He etethe his doome moste dampnabully,/For which I counseyle, and pleynly thus I mene,/ Ech man beo ware to kepe him prudently,/Not to resceive it, but yif he beo clene” (ll. 153–160). Hence Dante’s immersion into the river of Lethe—and, likewise, once more, pagan Virgil’s vanishing. Let us now return to Dante facing the Griffin. At this point, he is permitted only to look at its reflection as reproduced in Beatrice’s eyes. In this way, Dante witnesses that double-creature as if through a mirror, as a dazzling vision rooted in replications. As Dante the Poet (and dually his Pilgrim) recounts of that ocular experience, A thousand desires hotter than flame held my eyes on [Beatrice’s] shining eyes, which remained still fixed on the Griffin, and even like the sun in a mirror the two-fold beast shone within them, now with the one, now with the other nature. Think, reader, if I marvelled when I saw the thing still in itself and in its image changing. (Purg. xxxi.118–126, trans. Sinclair)

We do well to ponder, as many before have: Who or what is the Griffin? While “traditionally described as a fierce and rapacious flying quadruped” (Armour, “Canto xxix” 333), Dante’s Griffin is a remarkably peaceful animal—and a draught animal, at that. Perhaps this accounts for why, in so much extant commentary, he “is virtually always identified as Christ” (333). As Peter Armour recounts, the creature’s “aquiline parts, with their immensely tall wings, are taken to allude to Christ’s precious and sublime divinity, its white and red parts to his flesh-and-blood humanity, or his purity and charity” (337).26 Armour complicates this picture, however, by observing that it is never entirely clear whether Dante is witnessing Christ in person “or solely as some symbolic expression” (337, emphasis added). Indeed, he, like John Ciardi, ends up arguing that ultimately it is Beatrice who shall narratively “stand in for Christ” (337). Some fragment of the answer regarding the Griffin’s identity is assuredly to be found in the fact that this creature is half-lion, half-eagle and a docile (as opposed to infernally bestial) animal. More importantly, the Griffin is an animal wedded half to the earth (as lion) and half to the heavens (as bird). While earthbound “through its lion’s body,” as Stambler puts it, the Griffin is simultaneously “heaven-directed through its eagle’s head and wings” (254) Unlike draught animals, further, which typically pull cargo by their chests, this Griffin “draws

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the chariot by its neck,” which is where its “two bodies (and qualities) join or are merged with each other” (254). Is Dante signaling thus his Pilgrim’s—and our—current location in a space that is liminal? We, not unlike the Pilgrim—nor unlike this creature—are only half-tethered to earth. We are currently bound to Earthly Paradise, but soon shall be aerially bound for Paradise. Even more, while presently we are tied to Christ’s place in terrestrial and biblical history, soon we shall be en route to his eternal location in heaven. For that reason, I tend to agree with Sinclair who concedes that the Griffin is Christ—but Christ expressly “in His earthly life” (Dante’s Purgatorio 430, emphasis added). Certainly the Griffin’s twofold nature underscores Christ’s incarnationally twofold nature—of Christ having been, when on earth, both man and God (Ciardi 542). Indeed, Dante lays emphasis in multiple instances on the creature’s double nature: as “doppia fiera, animal binato, biforme fera, and, above all, [in] the line which is probably responsible for the unanimity of critics, ancient and modern, in interpreting the symbol as of Christ (la fiera), ‘Ch’e sola una persona in due nature [the animal that is one person in two natures] (xxxi.80), since it seems to echo the creeds” (Hardie103). Colin Hardie, who argues the preceding, at the same time advocates that commentators have been too hasty in accepting the Griffin as Dante’s symbol of Christ. But if the Griffin isn’t this symbol, we might ask, why does it later rise “up to Heaven,” as Matilda informs us, leaving its cart behind? Perhaps this is a symbol of the resurrecting Christ, as distinct from the resurrected Christ. If here I am to some degree contradicting myself, given what earlier I suggested vis-à-vis Beatrice’s Eucharistically charged arrival, perhaps that is only fitting. Contradiction seems, after all, to be at the heart of the Pilgrim’s own “conceptual struggle” (Raffa, Divine 21), which he endures in seeing and in trying to fathom the invisible, irreducible hybridity of two complete natures existing simultaneously both in, and as, a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth. While this may seem to reflect “the union of sameness and difference that Anselm expresses in theological terms as two complete natures coexisting in one person,” as Raffa asserts, it will not be until “the wayfarer experiences this central tenet of his faith without the mediating function of Beatrice” that his journey will properly end (71, emphasis added). In other words, the Pilgrim is seeing only an approximation of “the union of two complete natures in a single person,” continues Raffa, [a] visual sign of the Incarnation, a corrective to the divided and doubled figures of hell … It is this temporal paradox, the “both at the same time,” that makes Dante’s Griffin an inexact representation of the Incarnation, for the wayfarer sees the complete images of the eagle and lion alternating with one another rather than coexisting in their complete natures. (77)

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This claim indisputably, even if altogether unintentionally, certifies not only the paradigmatic importance of the Eucharist to the Comedy but the sublime, unmediated coexistence of flesh and Flesh that will comprise Dante’s final vision in Paradise. Dante’s visually refracted encounter with the Griffin is a scene upon which many scholars have understandably dwelled. Hardie, for one, points out how Dante sees in the mirror of Beatrice’s eyes “multiple images of an apparently stable union of two natures” (127). Hawkins, meanwhile, waxes over the uncanny effect of the apparition, paralleling it with the familiar Gestalt example of the rabbit-duck. The eye can take in one or the other, but not the two at once. So here: the griffin is the Gestalt of the Incarnation, seen as an eagle at one instance and a lion at another … [I]t is to demonstrate the impossibility of holding in mind at once and at the same time the two natures in one Person. (Dante 111–112)

Hawkins’ likening of Dante’s experience to that of someone attempting to discern a fixed and unitary form in the Gestalt rabbit-duck seems entirely apt; for how else are we holistically to engage with the profound paradox of Christ being both man and god?27 On the other hand, Raffa discloses that a mirror reflecting the sun was itself “a traditional symbol for Christ” (Divine 70). And so, we get, as so often we do in the Comedy, symbols that are packed alongside, and even on top of, selfsame symbols. How, then, are we to explain that Dante’s eyes, which are “dazzled as if by the sun,” must “be weaned from a kind of idolatry of Beatrice” (Hardie 117)? After all, Beatrice does remove her veil, permitting Dante to feast “too fixedly” (xxxii.6, trans. Ciardi) on her appearance. Is her rebuke of him doing so perchance what instigates the Heavenly Pageant’s wheeling about and traveling east? In this case, there may be something to Hardie’s proposal that Dante’s symbolic seeing of Christ in Beatrice’s eyes is impracticable, given that he “has to by-pass her, precisely in order to see the divine essence” (127). In fact, the doubleness of all these reflecting surfaces now moves us, as Eleanor Cook shrewdly perceives, toward a decidedly threefold seeing: “The Griffin gleams, not just as in a mirror, but as the sun in a mirror. Dante can apparently now look upon a light so [terrestrially] intense … It is true that he is seeing at one remove. Beatrice can gaze directly at the changing Griffin, presumably as one of the fully redeemed” (97). What we encounter, therefore, is less Beatrice as “a symbol of the sacrament in which Christ continues His presence in the church”

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(Fisher 109–110)—and, indeed, Beatrice is frequently presupposed to represent the Church (Hardie 117)—than Beatrice as an ingress to Christ’s continuing presence in the Church. We have access here to Christ, but it is always, in some respects, an ocularly veiled access. (Keep in mind that we see no human figure of Christ anywhere in this canticle, in spite of its being steeped in Christological symbolism.) For Fisher, this is no accident, as, in Eucharistic devotion, “Christ is over and over again spoken of as hidden beneath the veils of bread and wine. They conceal Christ as things are concealed from us by a physical veil” (110). Historical and theological precedent for her claim can be found in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux—that very contemplative who, in the next canticle, will escort the Pilgrim to the limit of Paradise. Bernard speaks of Exodus’ pillar of cloud in the wilderness as foretelling the holy sacrament as, like the sacrament, God’s majesty was too splendid for humankind’s mortal infirmity to bear, and, so, the Lord required veiling (110). A generation after Dante, Catherine of Sienna, in her Dialogue, has Christ say, “In that place thou didst see and taste the abyss of the Trinity, whole God and whole man, concealed and veiled in that whiteness that thou sawedst in the bread” (qtd. in Fisher 110). This is a veil capable of being lifted only in Heaven—and, needless to say, only by faith; and it is faith that Dante will have subsequently to prove, in order that he may progress to the Empyrean of Heaven, the dwelling place of God. Is Beatrice thus being dramatized here as (what Bernard describes of) the Church: the “Glorious and beloved bride, [who] on earth … hast the bridegroom in the sacrament, [and] in heaven without the veil” (qtd. in Fisher 111)?

Preparing for the bread of angels Before becoming indecorously drunk on Beatrice’s unveiled beauty, Dante does manage to glimpse the Griffin; and, according to a handful of modern scholars, Eucharistic allusions flourish in what he manages to descry. According to Collins, the Griffin’s (divinely) gold eagle parts and (flesh-and-blood) white and red lion parts suggest Christ’s “flesh and blood in the Eucharist” (255)—prompting Dante to exclaim that his soul, “delighted and amazed, was tasting of that food which satisfies and, at the same time, makes one hungrier” (Purg. xxxi.127–129). Dante’s experience of knowing Christ is, in this way, complemented by his “tasting Him as delightful food” (Collins 255). Reynolds likewise associates Dante’s impassioned statement with the Eucharist (312), while Eleanor Cook maintains that, in this episode, Dante is seeing “the Eucharist itself come alive, and so perforce an earthly form of Christ” (107).28

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We could just as well recommend that what Dante offers—and experiences here—is, more accurately, a foretaste. Bernard Stambler so much as says so: “The joy and wonder of this sight are foretastes of the bliss of paradise, where not only this sight but all others will have the eternal paradoxical quality of satisfying all spiritual hunger and at the same moment stimulating new hunger” (267).29 Two observations bolster such a viewpoint. One comes from Stambler, who rightly perceives that “the resolution of duality is not final, as the resolution of the trinity is: a time element—‘now with one, now with the other nature’—keeps the present scene on the human level” (268). No wonder, then, that Christ’s unified duality is only visible when Beatrice’s eyes act as an intermediary: “Beatrice’s eyes do not create truth (the light and vision of Christ), but they are the needed means for the transmission of truth to the pilgrims at this stage of the journey” (268–269). Consider, as well, that the biblical origin of Dante’s allusion to tasting food comes not from the New Testament but from the Old. It is from Ecclesiastics 24:21, more specifically, where Wisdom exhorts: “They that eat me shall yet be hungry, and they that drink me shall yet be thirsty” (qtd. in Musa 410). We are, in this way, being prepared, I would advise, with Exodus and Ecclesiastics—and even the Incarnation—serving as heralds. Hence my inclination—nay, incapacity but—to concur with Sinclair’s adamant rejection that Dante could have “totally ignored the Eucharist in such a work as the Purgatorio” (Dante’s Purgatorio 416). Indeed, what Sinclair has to say more broadly on the subject—even if he identifies Beatrice as the figure symbolically representative of the Host—is worth repeating here: The total absence of the Eucharist from the Purgatorio would be strange in itself and it would be especially so in the conditions of the time, when the subject was prominently before the mind of the Church. … Correspondences so marked between the pageant and the familiar festival of the Host [Corpus Christi] can hardly be other than deliberate in a context so studied. (415)

Still, it does seem likely—plausible, at least, given Stambler’s insights—that, when finally we taste the Eucharist, when its substance is given to us whole and full, permitting us thus to participate in direct communion with Christ, allusions to its actual presence—indeed, to its Real Presence—would be expressed in post-Incarnational terms. Should we not expect, in other words, for Dante’s choice of biblical allusion to be more in line with the “new” theology as housed, say, in Jesus’ proclamation in John 6:35 “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty”? Here, we might borrow from Armour, who observes that,

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when it comes to the beast with two natures in a single person, one can just as well reverse the reference: Instead of the association being that the Griffin is Christ, Christ is conceivably being applied here to the Griffin (Dante’s 46). Analogously, that Beatrice is the Host could well be substituted by the claim that the Host here is being applied to Beatrice. The Griffin can only remain “an earthly image of Christ,” after all—which is to say, it cannot be “the revelation of the full mystery of God made man which will be the culminating experience of the Paradiso and of the poem” (162).30 For Armour, the Griffin operates as an image of Rome (163)—or of Christ, we might say, as applied by the Roman Church. Either way, the emphasis remains on the Church Militant, on the “Christ-like ideal in the perfect Monarch on earth” (163). Or, if we prefer the words of Collins, in this realm we are dealing with the “divine gifts—Bible, Sacrament, Church—[which] are an incarnate presence of the transcendent God in our world of nature” (132). Certainly, one can read Matilda’s earlier chide of Dante—for being so absorbed “in the ‘living lights’ of the oncoming pageant” that he neglects the “actual movement of revelation ‘which comes behind them’” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 341)—as a subtle commentary on how such a pageant, however perfect, can only be representative of the doctrine of Christ as dispatched by the Church Militant (491). Of course perfection can go awry, and that is precisely the theme of the “allegorical masque” (Ciardi 562) that we as well as Dante (and Statius, though silent) are about to witness. At the travelers’ entry into the lofty wood—empty by the fault of Eve “who believed the serpent”—and Beatrice’s subsequent descent from the car, the ladies murmur “Adam!” (Purg. xxxii.37, trans. Sinclair 421). They form a circle around the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is bare and leafless—until the Griffin ties his cart’s pole to it, and its branches instantaneously flower. At this, the receding pageant breaks into a hymn that Dante acknowledges is unintelligibly foreign to his ears. Nevertheless, the overpowering song induces in him a narcotic-like sleep. When Dante awakes, he finds the Heavenly Pageant gone, though Beatrice remains seated beneath the tree’s rich, new foliage and attended to by Seven Nymphs (the virtues). Dante parallels his slumber and rising to the experience of the three disciples who witnessed Christ’s Transfiguration (Stambler 276–277), when Christ metamorphosed into a radiant light, with the voice of God declaring him “Son.” This reflexive comparison certainly augments this canticle’s perpetual play of terrestrial and celestial doubles (Schnapp, Transfiguration 114)—not to mention, Dante’s own (in the words of 2 Corinthians) “beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord” (3:18). But there is a dual resonance, as Benfell discerns, for it was

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through their encounter with the Transfiguration that the apostles glimpsed Christ’s identity “outside of history” (178). But we are still in a place of history—at least, if we are amenable to reading Dante’s poem Eucharistically. This place is also one where, in spite of his having come as the Second Adam and left behind “His Church and His abiding presence in Word and sacrament” (Collins 148), Christ has not always been “done right” by his terrestrial ministers. Here, then, begins that part of the masque that Ciardi fittingly calls “The Corruption of the Church through Wealth” (562): An Eagle (representative of the Roman Empire) swoops down, molesting both tree and car—as does, also, a Fox (representative of heresy). The returning Eagle covers the car with its plumage, while a Dragon (Satan—or, according to Anderson and others, possibly Islam (369)) next rips the car from its foundation. Covering itself with feathers (riches), the car transforms into a monstrous beast on which rides a Harlot (the corrupt Papacy). The Harlot and a Giant standing next to her (the French Monarchy) kiss each other again and again. But then, “she turned her roving, lustful eyes on me,” Dante recounts, and “her lover in a fit of rage beat her ferociously from head to foot” (Purg. xxxii.154–156). The Giant thereafter unties the monster-car and drags it violently off into the woods. As always, Dante’s meanings vis-à-vis these allegorical figures must be taken as “fluid, interpenetrating and multidimensional” (Collins 131). Nevertheless, his medieval readers would have been well acquainted with “the close association of the tree in the garden with the tree of the cross, and perhaps with paintings of the cross bearing flower and fruit” (Ralphs 35). Some correspondences may have been more literal, too, given that, in the medieval period, Christ’s cross was popularly believed to have been hewn from a limb or descendant of that forbidden tree (Stambler 275). Christ, moreover, was believed to have been crucified on the same site where Adam’s skull had been buried (Anderson 368). Since we know to read for figural or typological links between events in the Old Testament and their fulfillment in the New, “between mankind’s loss of original innocence and the Redemption by the new Adam,” Dante’s Garden of Eden correlates quite densely with both the tree of the Fall and the locale of Christ’s crucifixion (Armour, Dante’s 2). As such, the earlier blooming of the tree with imperial-colored blossoms—that is, ones distinctly purple in hue (xxxii.59–60)—may well be Dante’s means of signaling Christ as the tree’s “true fruit” (Ralphs 36). Dante may also be signaling more exclusively via this purple coloring the passion and death of Christ—hence Christ’s “sacrificial blood” infusing the tree with its color (Musa 377). (Later in the century, Giovanni Cavallini would employ a similar image. As Armour recounts, “the cross, a

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shameful method of executing thieves, had been a ‘sterile, fruitless tree,’ but when Christ, its flower and fruit … , was hung upon it, it became precious, fertile, and fruitful” (Dante’s 194).) In Auberbach’s imagining, the Griffin is Christ, and so, for him, when the beast fastens its chariot to that tree, it is in recognition of the increasingly troubled world-order enacted in the dumb show—complete, for Auerbach, with persecutions of Christians (the Eagle’s assaults); heresies (the fox); and the Donation of Constantine (the feathering of the cart by the Eagle) (123). The Donation, a forged ninth-century decree that transferred the privileges and properties of Rome to the pope, was considered by Dante to be one of the most corrupting influences on the Church, embroiling it in unseemly pursuits of power and wealth (Royal 174). Even worse, with time, the Roman curia (which for Auerbach, as for Ciardi, is represented by the Harlot) falls prey to “unrestrained illegitimate power” (the Giant) (123). And so, as Auerbach intertextually sums up of the allegory’s lesson, “The world is out of joint, its God-ordained balance is upset, and the root of all evil is the wealth of the Church which according to the divine order should possess nothing” (124). This is the Rome associated in the Middle Ages with Babylon, in other words. Its corrupt curia, its political ambitions are here aligned with “the meretrix of the Apocalypse, whose victim is spiritual Rome, the ecclesia spiritualis” (Storey 366). What this tragedy of events signals, according to H. Wayne Storey, is the requirement that redemption “right this state of affairs” (371). No wonder, then, that the last canto of Purgatory opens with a sung lamentation of “Deus, venerunt gentes” (O God, the nations have come [into your inheritance] (Purg. xxxiii.1)); for, how better for that righting to be accomplished than by returning to the ecclesia spiritualis, to the center of the Catholic Church, to the Eucharist? In this reading, in other words, Dante’s journey through Paradise is intended as a return to—and as a returning of— that fruit to its proper place. Worth also bearing in mind is Beatrice’s anguish at the ladies’ “dulcet psalmody,” which Dante compares to the Virgin Mary’s experience while at the cross (Purg. xxxiii.2). When Beatrice rises to speak, however, she does so “erect on her feet and glowing like fire”: “Modicum, et non videbitis me,” she intones, “et iterum, sisters dear to me, modicum et vos videbitis me” (Purg. xxxiii.10–12). These are essentially the words Christ spoke prophetically to his disciples: “A little while, and ye shall not see me: and again, a little while, and ye shall see me (John xvi.16)” (Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 435, 442)—at which point Christ revealed with respect to his imminent death and resurrection, “I am going to the Father” (John 16:16). It is Dante’s omission of that final line

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regarding the Father which is—at least for Stambler—entirely striking. True, for Beatrice to say she was going would be entirely incongruous; but the absence of a phrase so putatively anticipated, says Stambler, “leaves the reader as though looking for an expected step that has suddenly disappeared” (284). We ought additionally to keep in mind that, following this prophecy in the Gospel of John, Christ guarantees his disciples that the fruition of his departure—which is to say, his post-resurrective return—will terminate his disciples’ grief and bring, in its place, joy. Surely such alluded-to “promises” endorse Purgatory as the locale of Christ on earth.31 Indeed, that Beatrice is overtly likened by Dante to Mary at the cross (a charged equation, if ever there was one) may signal, as per Sinclair, Beatrice’s position as the Church’s true soul (Dante’s Purgatorio 443). She stands counter to those woeful vicissitudes which—certainly in Dante’s estimation— historically profaned the Temple of God (Cervigni 379).32 If all this is so, and given how much Dante stresses Christ’s earthbound legacy in this canticle, as well as his appearance and now disappearance (including the tacit promise that Christ shall come again), should we not expect, as readers, to find Christ momentously in Paradise, even if in some indirectly manifest way? In fact, given that Christ is human but also more than human, Dante’s refrain from portraying Christ through exclusively human means makes theological, and even politically charged, sense. Much as others have come as Christ in this intermediate realm, or in some shift-shaping, indeterminate form or reflection of Christ, we do well to anticipate Christ’s continuing and central presence in Heaven. As for Dante’s Pilgrim, he is only human; and, so, before he can ascend, he must complete the process of purification. Once again, he is led to water, alongside ever-mum Statius, although this time the river is Eunoë. “O light, O glory of the human race,” he exclaims upon seeing the source from which it and the river of Lethe spring: “what is this water pouring from one source, and then dividing self from self?” (Purg. xxxiii.115–117). Once again—this time through the nature of Eunoë’s wellspring—we are confronted with something that is not merely both itself and another but is itself and another in itself. While in this canticle, the timbre of these paradoxes have gestured primarily toward the Incarnation, in the next, we shall find the allusions increasingly directed toward not only the Trinity but also—especially as we approach the Empyrean— the doctrine of transubstantiation. Recall, in preparation for that, what we left behind in the thirty-third canto of the Inferno: Ugolino’s sons offering a meal of their own flesh to their father, with the oldest son plaintively inquiring, “Father, why don’t you help me?” Just as interesting is the parallel between the

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thirty-third canto of Purgatory and the following pathetic exhortation delivered by Ugolino’s sons: “Father it would give us much less pain if you ate us: it was you who put upon us this sorry flesh; now strip it off again” (Inf. xxxiii.61–63, trans. Ciardi). In the corresponding lines in Purgatory xxxiii (61–63), we are informed that it was through the tasting of Eden’s forbidden fruit that “the first soul longed in pain and in desire five thousand years and more for Him who avenged on Himself that taste” (trans. Sinclair). Eating, taste, flesh, Christ’s sacrifice of his own flesh in the name of his Father: even if the numerical conformities are mere coincidences, Dante’s first two canticles are so irrefutably replete with flesh-related imagery that we ought not to forego an expectation of such imagery carrying into the abode of God. For now, however, we remain figuratively on earth—with Dante about to be transformed by Eunoë’s waters. These waters, incidentally, are Dante’s creation entirely (Cervigni 385). The first Edenic river, Lethe, deleted Dante’s memory of his past sins (including his youthful slighting of Beatrice, as she tells him) (386), much in the way that God forgets the sins of repentant Catholics. Now, Eunoë’s waters bring Dante’s memory back, though only of the good deeds accumulated during his lifetime. Upon ingesting that “sweet draught which never would have sated me,” Dante emerges from Eunoë’s blessed waters completely remade; not unlike “new plants renewed with new leaves,” he is pure now, and, so, ready finally “to mount the stars” (Purg. xxxiii.142–145, trans. Sinclair). The Pilgrim, in effect, has been rendered a prelapsarian “new creature,” something that could only be achievable through—and thus requires a belief in—Christ’s Redemption (Cervigni 387). Suggestively, this baptism and renewal occur at the approximate time of day when, in the medieval tradition, Adam would have been expelled from Eden (Cervigni 383). Moreover, the Pilgrim’s forthcoming ascent is patterned after Christ’s death and ascension, which some ancient traditions held occurred precisely at noon (383). And there is more: for, in keeping with the analogic progression Dante has been making through an eastward-oriented church, we find him now directly “beneath the cross” (Watt 145). Indeed, Dante’s description of Mary at the outset of Canto xxxiii (“hardly more grief showed in the face of Mary at the cross” (5–6)) places her, and thus us, quite explicitly beneath the foot of the crucifix (145). In typical multivalent medieval fashion, Dante intimates that we have also reached Jerusalem. And so now, his Pilgrim is ready to ascend to Heaven—which in architectural terms is exemplified by the apse, a space that can only be entered by those who have been initiated (145). Does this mean the Pilgrim is also at that very altar upon which are placed the venerated vessels

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that hold the wafers and the wine? This is the spot, in other words, whence the bread is transformed into Christ’s Body. For many in today’s secular culture, the sublime dynamism of such an encounter may have lost its edge. As a result, it is worth our recalling that the quest for the Holy Grail was, in its literary origins, profoundly religious, a parable whose expedition was for the sake of gazing upon and adoring the Eucharist: Fittingly enough, it is in the text of a Grail legend composed in the first years of the thirteenth century—the Grand St. Graal … that we find what is one of the earliest explicit descriptions of prayer before the reserved Eucharist, wherein a mother on her deathbed, living in a pagan land, exhorts her daughter to pray regularly before the Blessed Sacrament. (Groeschel and Monti 210)

Might we argue that, with his penance done and cleansed of his sins, Dante, like a newly baptized innocent, is perfect and pure—ready not only for the Stars but to gaze, spiritually speaking, upon the Host?

Notes 1 Suggestively, the Poet ties this image to Isaiah 35:7 and Job 14:7, both of which allude to the renewal of vegetation (Raimondi 9). 2 The psalm additionally “has its place in the ancient baptismal liturgy of Easter Eve, where Israel’s passing through the Red Sea is conflated with the sacrament of Christian initiation” (Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 257), as well as in Roman Catholic offices for the dying and in the burial of the dead (41–42). Also of interest is that, in a letter to Cangrande, Dante mystically interpreted its first words as signaling “the departure of the sanctified soul from the bondage of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory” (qtd. in Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 41). 3 Hollander contends that this is, in effect, an Easter Sunday rehearsal of the Exodus, whose accomplishment is signaled by the angel signing his flock with the cross and then withdrawing (“Canto ii” 15). 4 I take issue with Kirpatrick when he disparages Virgil’s account of the Trinity for its “vacuity” (“Canto iii” 30). On the other hand, his point in categorizing it as such is, admittedly, to laud the “lyrical intensity” with which the Trinity is celebrated in Paradise xiv (30). 5 In the original, the phrase “who is through all ages blessed” appears in Latin—as “qui est per Omnia secula benedictus” (Musa 649). 6 That the Church has, to some extent, abandoned faith in Dante’s eyes can be gleaned from the echoes of the crucified Christ that are embedded in his lament of Italy’s disorders: “Come see your city, Rome, in mourning now, widowed, alone,

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Dante’s Sacred Poem lamenting night and day: ‘My Caesar, why have you abandoned me?’” (Purg. vi.112–114). Watt suggests Dante prepared his readers to read the Comedy in this fashion. Thus, before reaching the gate of purgatory, when the Pilgrim evocatively describes an eagle he sees in his dream, readers are meant to recall the entrance to the Florentine church of San Miniato al Monte, which is “topped by an eagle,” making it “the perfect symbol for Dante’s rapture as the eagle lifts him up into the heavens” (128–129) For Stambler, Cantos xv–xviii comprise the poem’s dead center (163). Obviously, I differ on this point. This, Leupin takes from Alain de Lille’s De fide catholica, contra hereticos, valdenses, iaudaeos, et paganos, which Leupin considers relatively accurate as a source. As Leupin writes, Alain de Lille’s text doesn’t “yield to the polemical slander that fills other, numerous and implausible, refutations of Docetism,” Docetism being the belief that Jesus lacked full humanity and, so, his sufferings could not possibly have been real, but only outward in appearance (141). Watt, on the other hand, sees this as further evidence of Dante constructing a “metatextual church” (137): we are on the ground, perhaps in the nave, looking into the chancel, and toward the altar. Only in Paradise will we actually rise to course alongside the rose window and through to the heavens of the dome. As written in Matthew 27:46, “Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (qtd. in Sinclair, Dante’s Purgatorio 304). Armour argues that this ordination of sorts is one of only two sacramental symbols to be found in the Comedy, the other being Matrimony, in the form of “a theological image of the union of Christ and the Church” (Door 6–7). For Dante, he contends, “the Sacraments belong to life on earth,” and, so, “they play no direct part in [Dante’s] representation of the afterlife” (7). Clearly, I am at variance with his interpretation. For Hawkins, this lack of decoding is for the purposes of cultivating “the atmosphere of mystery and enigma characteristic of apocalyptic literature,” but he does provide us “strong iconographic clues” (Dante 48). For Fisher, the Earthly Paradise was the symbol of the Church (see 91–92). This was not an easy part of his poem to craft, as Dante himself testifies when, just prior to describing the procession, Dante beseeches the Muses, those “most holy virgins” (Purg. xxix.37), to aid him in versifying what is difficult even to ponder (Armour, “Canto xxix” 330). That Dante’s daughter came in 1320 to Ravenna, where her father was residing, and “entered a convent, and took the name Beatrice” (Lewis 73, emphasis added) must certainly have added to the multivalency of her meaning for Dante’s fourteenth-century readers.

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17 All the aforementioned questions arise from the possible readings that Armour offers. 18 Corpus Christi is a moveable feast, held on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, eight weeks after Easter Day. 19 There are of course dissenters—and perhaps for good reason, given that Thomas’ first biographer, Peter of Calo, never mentions the liturgy; “nor was it recorded in the material initially presented at his canonisation process” (Rubin, Corpus 185). On the other hand, according to Thomas’ confessor and disciple, Bartholomew of Lucca, Thomas was indeed that liturgy’s author (185). 20 Even Rubin allows that, although “no driving force from Rome” may have existed, the feast’s diffusion “down to 1300 was stimulated by initiatives of particular bishops, like Durandus, in their areas of influence” (Corpus 178). 21 Dunbar says something similar: “[Beatrice’s] appearance is sudden as the appearance of Christ under the ‘accidents’ of bread and wine, in the miracle of transubstantiation” (319). 22 Ralphs herself does not agree with this interpretation: “Rather, it would seem to be a pageant of revelation and the history of salvation, related, especially through the appearing of Beatrice, to Dante’s personal salvation” (32). 23 Here, she is publicly agreeing with Sinclair, who originally stated that Beatrice is the Host—or, rather, the image of the Host: “Beatrice is the particular type and image of that whole sacramental principle of which the Host itself is the greater Image” (Sayers 192). Obviously, I do not agree. 24 These words, also from the opening line of Psalm 117, are the ones with which Christ was saluted upon his entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (Hardie 114). Regarding Dante retaining the “He” despite talking about Beatrice: at this time, such a pronoun usage for a woman was a way of acknowledging her possession of a spirituality beyond question (Krahmer 308). The appearance of outer flesh did not determine whether someone was man or woman, as Origen had earlier stated; gender was determined on the basis of one’s inner nature vis-à-vis the moral and spiritual (309). Thus we find St. Francis nourishing Clare at his own breast: “‘Come, take, and suck’ … And when she took what remained in her mouth in her hands, it seemed to her that it was gold so bright and clear that she saw everything there as if in a mirror” (qtd. in McGinn 65). 25 As Kirkham humorously recounts, Dorothy Sayers “wondered with some irritation who the blazes Matilda is,” going so far as to note that her name, sometimes spelled Mathelda, is a possible “anagram ‘Ad Letham,’ appropriate for one who leads ‘to the Lethe’” (“Canto xviii” 320–321). 26 Even Wikipedia.com notes that, in medieval Christendom, the griffin, being “a union of terrestrial beast and an aerial bird”—with both these animals, lion and eagle, being king of their respective species—was taken as a symbol of Jesus (“Griffin”).

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27 Collins, meanwhile, recommends that the two “natures” of the mythological animal symbolize high Christology (divine nature) and low Christology (human nature) (255). 28 Pre-modern commentator Francesco da Buti interpreted the banners that trail between the Griffin’s wings as an image of the sacraments, “with the Eucharist in the middle” (Little 1–2). 29 Much as the Eucharistic presence of Christ “vouchsafed to the Church is the foretaste and pledge of the final vision of God,” as Fisher remarks, “so the revelation of Beatrice in Earthly Paradise is the foreshadowing of the revelation of God with which the Divine Comedy closes” (viii). In other words, Fisher does not consider this foretaste to be a foreshadowing of the Eucharist in heaven. 30 Armour, perhaps obviously, rejects that the Griffin can represent Christ, “for this would manifestly set Beatrice over and above the incarnate deity” (Dante’s 52). 31 Some scholars read the comment as one of Beatrice “foretelling the transference of the Papacy to Avignon and its longed-for return to Rome, an event that did not occur in Dante’s lifetime” (Reynolds 315). 32 As for her future enigmatic reference to a time “when a five hundred, ten and five, one sent from God, shall slay the thievish woman and the giant who sins” (xxxiii.43–45, trans. Sinclair 437), I will not even hazard a guess as to its meaning. “Countless readings have been proposed,” as Cervigni notes (381), and should anyone be interested in those, I recommend they read the pithy summaries he offers of them.

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Bread of Angels: Dante’s Paradise

While previous scholars have most certainly noted the saliency of the Eucharist to Dante’s Comedy, as the two preceding chapters make apparent, their discussions are generally relatively confined and often in passing. This may not seem the case to readers of this particular book, given the extent to which I have synthesized those discussions. But how else to explain that, as recently as 2006, we find Eleanor Cook musing that perhaps the Eucharist in Dante’s Comedy has been, “rather like Poe’s purloined letter,” “enigmatically and mysteriously hidden in too evident a place”(108). To be sure—and as we have seen—Ronald Herzman intuited in 2003 the inverted Eucharistic symbolism of the cannibalism in the Inferno and, many decades before him, Lizette Andrews Fisher argued on behalf of Purgatory’s sacramental allusions to the Corpus Christi pageant and to Beatrice as “the figure of the eucharistic Christ” (107). And there are of course many others whose agile detection of Eucharistic imagery in Hell and Purgatory we have already encountered. Yet, surprisingly, these discerned allusions to the Eucharist seem not to have led scholars to ponder their potential extension into—especially into, we might argue—the paradisal realm, which is, after all, the residence of the Eucharistic body, Christ. Why would a scholar like Fisher, we might ask, resist—if not all-out reject—that the Eucharistic imagery she teases from Purgatory could play a part in Paradise? Fortunately, for us, she answers that question: “[S]acraments belong to this life, they are part of the equipment of the church on earth, and Dante could treat of them only in that part of the Divine Comedy wherein the church militant, so to speak, has jurisdiction—the Purgatory” (89). Mary Watt’s The Cross That Dante Bears, from which I have also generously pulled, likewise closes off any future for the prominence, or even presence, in Paradise of Eucharistic imagery. Upon being purified at the end of Purgatory, she argues, our Pilgrim “is now back where he started, but he has been reoriented and rather than taking him away from the altar, removing him from the Communion, this trajectory will take him beyond it and up into heaven for the true communion that the Eucharist merely prefigures” (143).

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Such viewpoints merit calling into question, I would argue, on the basis of the simple (though hardly simplistic) and very Catholic belief that the Eucharist is Christ and, hence, that that sacrament might well be operating as much more than a mere prefiguration. Further, why would the central event of the entire Comedy be the purgatorial pageant, as some have suggested, rather than that pageant’s very reason for being? If so much of the stuff of Purgatory is about spirits preparing themselves for the reality of Christ (Shoaf, “Dante’s” 37), shouldn’t we expect to reach that reality in Paradise—though, of course, not in any terrestrially-bound incarnational form? We are mistaken, in other words, if we disregard too rashly the possibility of Paradise being imbued—perhaps, more heavily imbued, even—with Christ’s presence as Real Presence. That Paradise is the least read of Dante’s canticles makes this something of an irony. Even more, Paradise is often critically presented as a problem—at least, narratively speaking—what with its radiant souls having undergone transformations that no human eye can possibly penetrate (Auerbach 155). As souls who are sheer light, unrecognizable unless they verbally articulate their identity, they—or, rather, Dante, according to such critics—put Paradise at risk of becoming depersonalized and monotonously repetitive (155). As Auerbach worthily observes, however, such a criticism of Dante’s poetic opus springs from a Romantic prejudice “and shows that the critic has been unable to give himself to Dante’s subject as a whole” (155). Collins correspondingly bemoans the routine neglect of Paradise because of its challenging mysticism and metaphysical qualities, arguing that Paradise is in fact Dante’s “real masterpiece, the fruit of his intellectual, emotional and spiritual maturity” (201). Perhaps it is worth bearing in mind why this realm is evermore the stuff of radiance: diaphanous, translucent, and nimbly intangible. Here, we can turn once more to Auerbach, who insists that the modern views of poetry—as springing from intuition, which neither can nor need be carried back to its sources—all that is far removed from the spirit of Dante; for it is the truth of the rational doctrine which creates the concrete image and lends it power, and one who (as most readers do) remembers the passage but forgets that it refers to the Triumph of Christ is like a child picking raisins out of a cake; he gets very little of the taste of the cake. (Dante 156)

How else to approach a canticle, moreover, whose author explicitly declares his hope that it will, with divine inspiration, help readers better to pray (Hollander, “Why” 20)? Here, we enter a realm where Reason’s wings can only be “short,” as

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Beatrice warns in Paradise ii (l. 58, trans. Sinclair 35). While the Incarnation, which so dominated the last canticle, hinges on transcendence of reason, it is in Paradise especially where the “new, alternative way of knowing” (Raffa, Divine 5) mandated by faith and mystery—and by faith in mystery—comes fully to the fore. In spite of Dante’s continued respect for philosophy, human knowledge and will are fairly emphatically demonstrated here “to be hopeless without the power of grace” (Hawkins, Dante 107). The thirteenth-century theologian Bonaventure (1221–1274) describes this matter at some length in his Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum (Journey of the Mind into God): [H]owever much one is illuminated only by the light of nature and of acquired science, he cannot enter into himself that he may delight in the Lord himself, unless Christ be his mediator, Who says, “I am the door. By me, if any man enter in, he shall be saved; and he shall go in, and go out, and shall find pastures” [John 10, 9]. We do not, however, approach this door unless we believe in Him, hope in Him, and love Him. It is therefore necessary, if we wish to enter the fruition of Truth, as into Paradise, that we enter through faith, hope, and charity of the Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ, Who is as the tree of life in the middle of Paradise.1

On the surface, Bonaventure’s sentiments may appear inadvertently to support a belief in Purgatory as the realm of Christ, given that Christ operates there as the mediating force between humankind and God. Much as Bonaventure’s contemporary Thomas Aquinas proferred, however, it is the Triune God that Revelation makes known (Hamilton 195); and so, to split off Christ from Heaven, or Christ from God, or God from the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit from Christ would be to undo the Trinitarian nature of that inseparable relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And this three-in-one bond—distinct from the Griffin’s two-in-one nature but likewise incapable of being apprehended by intellect alone—is the very bond that is integrally “made manifest in the Eucharist” (“Disputation”). The very doctrine of transubstantiation was, in fact, formulated vis-à-vis Paul’s distinguished definition of what cannot be apprehended by intellect alone: “For faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen … Through faith we understand that the world was framed by the word of God, so that the things that are seen were made of things that are not seen [Heb. 11.1–3]” (qtd. in Durling, “Farinata” 33). Daringly, Dante is poetically attempting in Paradise to represent something similar—something which is, as John Freccero articulates, “by definition beyond representation”; Dante yearns to verbally materialize a world that is immaterial,

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even indescribable (“Introduction” 585). Although Freccero makes the preceding claim in order to home in on Dante’s attempt to activate the abstractly intangible universe of Wisdom or Divine Knowledge, his assertion is equally attributable to transubstantiation, which turns bread into Bread and an unconsecrated host into Christ’s Body. In fact, there is no greater res, or reality, in the Catholic faith—at least if we are to trust the words of Thomas Aquinas: “In this Sacrament are the real body and blood of Christ,” which “cannot be discerned by the senses or the understanding but only by faith” (qtd. in Stone, History 328). If we are willing to proceed with an eye on how this critical theological motif might be inflecting Dante’s Paradise, we can (and will) additionally come to see that Christ is hardly absent from this realm. Rather, he quietly permeates it, as a quite literal but equally miraculous flesh for the human soul. It may be worth our recalling here Raphael’s fresco Triumph of the Holy Sacrament, which I mentioned in the preface, and in which Dante can be found amid other individuals considered to be contributory to the transubstantiation debate. In this panoptic fresco, we see a marvelous representation of the journey our Pilgrim is about to undertake: from the terrestrially-bound altar upon which stands a filigreed monstrance (containing a white, consecrated Host); past the Holy Spirit descending as a dove (behind which appears a pale yellow orb, echoing the smaller white Host); and further aloft to the risen Christ (exhibiting his wounds and engirdled by a gold circle); above whom appears God, a halflunette of gilt light fanning inversely around him. The direct line between these—from Eucharist, to Holy Spirit as dove, to Christ in his resurrected form, to God—one leading vertically to the next, precisely through the middle of the fresco, surely underscores the essentiality of the Eucharist to this Trinitarian project. For this reason, we perhaps need to find a more literal truth in Paradise, one that recognizes, reads for, and preserves the Trinity’s link to the Eucharist. Dante’s Comedy is still a text, of course, words written on parchment and, later, on paper, necessitating that things “not seen” be chirographically detectable. The imperceptible had to become, if not unambiguously visualized, at least experienced. But is this not the very essence of believing in the Eucharist? Dante, I shall argue, is attempting in this canticle—lovingly and most deferentially—to generate that experience. Indeed, that Dante would have been writing on flesh, in the form of vellum made of calfskin, and that his century’s readers would have been reading his poetry from the same, would have feasibly heightened this celebration of Christ’s sacramental form as it was mysteriously cast or faithfully alluded to in Paradise. The Eucharist, that “heavenly Bread [which] puts an end to all images,” was, after all, as Thomas rejoiced in his Corpus Christi hymn Panis Angelicus, the “wonderful reality” of humankind’s being able to “eat the Lord.”

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Bread from heaven It is in Paradise ii that we first hear word of the “Bread of Angels.” The canto opens with a metaphorical caveat to readers regarding the deep, unexplored waters that they are about to chart: “Those few of you who from your youth have raised your eager mouths in search of angels’ bread on which man feeds here, always hungering, you may, indeed, allow your boat to sail the high seas in the furrow of my wake” (Par. ii.10–14). By no means would I rebuff the sage readings of scholars like Peter Armour, Giuseppe Mazzotta and Mark Musa, who contend that the Bread of Angels operates here as a trope for knowledge of God or wisdom. But might it not also be functioning as something semantically more literal? The disquisitions on reason and faith that so absorb Dante as he makes his way through Heaven’s spheres take on a doubly rich resonance when one sees them through the prism of that more literal lens. So, too, do the Poet’s earnest iterations regarding how faith alone will permit a reader to grasp the wonders to come. As a result, I quite agree with Daniel J. Ransom, who insists that in Paradise, the “pan de li angeli” is of “theological substance”—a substance that Dante earlier elided in his “misguided appropriation” of the biblical metaphor for his Convivio (92). What in the Convivio served simply as a metaphor for “food for thought” is now reinvested by Dante with theological marrow, with “food for the soul” (92). Before hitching alongside the Pilgrim as he makes his interplanetary journey, it might behoove us to plumb the semantic depths of the Bread of Angels further. While it is true that scholars like Armour urge that the sacraments have no place in Paradise (Door 8),2 Anselm of Leon (c. 1059–1117) was adamant that the Eucharist communicants received was the same food upon which the angels in heaven contemplatively fed (Mazza 187). Besides, the Pilgrim is explicitly informed that Paradise, as he witnesses it, is “but a representation constructed for Dante’s benefit so that he may comprehend” (Watt 148). Perhaps, Dante the Poet is intentionally alerting us against the Thomistic proposition that “the Sacraments do not remain in the afterlife” (qtd. in Armour, Door 8). Unlike a philosopher, Dante was making practical and poetically aesthetic use of imagery both familiar to his readers and inspirational to him—not to mention, spiritually charged in the case of the Bread of Angels. (As for why Christ is referred to as the Bread of angels: Angels “feed spiritually upon the supernatural nourishment coming from the Incarnation,” explains Basil Nortz, “whereas men feed on this same grace through the Sacraments of the Church, especially the Eucharist. Therefore the Blessed Sacrament is properly called the bread of angels.”) Besides, Dante urges us at the outset of Paradise to look for a truth that is literal

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and literally behind the metaphor—which is to say, lurking beneath Dante’s deployment of the astronomical science of his time (Royal 181), beneath the allegory that will nourish us (Verdicchio 22). To emphasize the implied co-extensivity here of the real and the metaphorical—or, rather, the metaphorical as real—we need only to revisit the Gospel of John, that lone non-synoptic gospel, more theology than biography. During John’s presentation of Christ’s discourse in the synagogue at Capernaum, Christ replies as follows to his Jewish interlocutors regarding their forefathers eating manna in the desert: “In truth I tell you,/it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven/it is my Father who gives you the bread from heaven,/the true bread;/for the bread of God/is the bread which comes down from heaven/and gives life to the world” (John 6:32–33). (Incidentally, “I am the bread of life come down from heaven”3 are the words inscribed on the oldest extant stamp we possess—from the sixth century—that was used to produce hosts (Foley 59).) When his rapt audience requests that bread, Jesus informs them, “I am the bread of life./No one who comes to me will ever hunger;/no one who believes in me will ever thirst” (6:35). Later, in a discursive repetition of this, Christ more forcibly associates the bread with immortality and his own physical flesh: I am the bread of life./Your fathers ate manna in the desert/and they are dead;/ but this is the bread which comes down from heaven,/so that a person may eat it and not die. I am the living bread which has come down from heaven./Anyone who eats this bread will live forever;/and the bread that I shall give/is my flesh, for the life of the world. (John 6:48–51)

When the Jews argue against Christ’s proclamation, which they construe as repulsive, Christ reinforces its “repulsive” qualities with even greater stridency: If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man/and drink his blood,/you have no life in you./Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood/has eternal life,/ and I shall raise that person up on the last day./For my flesh is real food/and my blood is real drink./Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood/lives in me/and I live in that person./ … [A]nyone who eats this bread will live forever. (John 6:53–58)

If we are to read the Bread of Angels only metaphorically—and, even more, only exclusively as a metaphor for Divine Wisdom—are we not then reading problematically against the grain of Christ’s own proclamation that his flesh is real food, that he is bread come down from heaven?

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We do not need exclusively to rely on John. Commentaries on John, and on the Eucharist more generally, recapitulate the realism of Christ as bread. We can turn, for instance, to Augustine who, in Treatise on the Gospel of St. John, reiterates the idea of feeding on Christ: “The Lord said that He is the bread which cometh down from heaven, exhorting us to believe in Him. For to believe in Him is to eat the living bread. He who believes eats; he is invisibly fed because he is invisibly reborn” (qtd. in Stone, History 92). Elsewhere, in a sermon, Augustine catechizes, “Who is the Bread of heaven except Christ? But in order that man might eat the bread of angels, the Lord of the angels became a man” (qtd. in O’Connor 58). Stephen of Autun (d. 1139) urges in On the Sacrament of the Altar, “It is our faith and must really be believed that when the priest says the words, ‘This is My body,’ there is no longer earthly bread but that Bread which came down from heaven, the Mediator of God and men, Jesus Christ” (qtd. in Stone, History 280). Closer perhaps to Dante’s time and intellectual caste is Thomas Aquinas. In the Corpus Christi feast hymn Lauda Sion Savatorem, generally attributed to him, Thomas gives commensurate witness to the Eucharist as the Bread of Angels: “Behold the bread of angels, sent/For pilgrims in their banishment,/The bread of God’s true children meant,/That may not unto dogs be given” (qtd. in Nortz). As for what is recommended to be said after Communion, for that we can turn to Bonaventure’s Prayer, which includes the following: … Grant that my soul may hunger after Thee, the Bread of Angels, the refreshment of holy souls, our daily and supersubstantial [substance-transcending] bread, having all sweetness and savor and every delightful taste. May my heart ever hunger after and feed upon Thee, Whom the angels desire to look upon, and may my inmost soul be filled with the sweetness of Thy savor … (“Prayer”)

Is it really plausible that all this would not be substantial—and, in a manner of speaking, supersubstantial—to Dante’s Paradise? That Thomas (whose philosophical assertions Dante clearly admired) never ceased discussing Eucharistic presence (Burr 10) gives us additional motivation to scan Paradise apropos a Eucharistically motivated Bread of Angels. Even if Dante did not follow Thomas’ doctrines slavishly, as has become the accepted scholarly wisdom, his incorporation of many of that angelic doctor’s doctrines into his Comedy is fairly universally acknowledged (Cogan xxiii). For that reason alone, it might be worth exploring what Thomas had to say scholastically about Eucharistic presence. His recorded thought on the topic, as David Burr relates, extends from his days as a sententarius, when he delivered lectures on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (10). But it is the tightly

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woven Summa Theologiae that is said to offer Thomas’ “definitive statement on eucharistic presence” (12). Of the ninety articles that comprise that work, eleven deal specifically with Eucharistic doctrine (Whalen 12). Thomas’ question as to “whether the true body of Christ is contained in the sacrament of the altar” (qtd. in Burr 10) is answered systematically—with painful tidiness, even. Not only is the body contained there, Thomas articulates; it is all that is contained there. Consubstantiation, the coexistence of bread and flesh, would contradict Christ’s proclamation of “This is my body” (hoc est corpus meum); it would imply that the consecrated Host remained corporeal rather than being converted into a purely spiritual food (Burr 11). Only the appearance of bread remains, Thomas insists—its accidents, in other words, under which Christ’s body is hidden. As for the substance, that is the body of Christ (Summa IV.63 257–261): “and so we have in this sacrament both memory and representation of our Lord’s passion. And in this our Lord’s words are fulfilled: ‘My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood drink indeed’ (John 6:56)” (Summa IV.61 253). One might even contend that, in III.60 of the Summa, in which Thomas elucidates the sacrament as a sign, he prefigures the tripartite structure of Dante’s Comedy: “A sacrament is a sign that is both a reminder of the past, that is, the Passion of Christ; and an indication of that which is effected in us by Christ’s Passion, that is, grace; and a prognostic (precognosticum), that is, a foretelling (praenuntiativum) of future glory” (qtd. in Biffi). For Thomas, further, the whole of Christ, both his substance and accidents,4 is present in the Eucharist: “The whole nature of a substance is contained in a quantity of any size,” as Burr outlines of Thomas’ position, “be it tiny or gigantic. The whole nature of man, for example, is contained in a large or small man” (14). Here, it is worth our recalling Watt’s proposal that, throughout Purgatory, we have been moving through an allegorically architectural space akin to that of an eastern-oriented cruciform church. At the point where Purgatory ends and at which we now find ourselves, the Pilgrim’s location would be comparable to our standing in the apse, in front of the very altar where the Host undergoes consecration. Indeed, Watt herself observes apropos Paradise that Dante often includes images which recall apses of the medieval churches to which he had traveled, especially those of Ravenna and Veneto where he spent his final days (149). Worth consideration, as well, is our positioning at the outset of Paradise in terms of time, both inferentially and scientifically. The sun, that “lamp of the world [that] rises on mortals by different entrances,” is, as we are told in Canto i, at the Vernal Equinox, that period when it “joins four circles with three crosses” (Par. i.38–39).5 The implication is that it is noon in Purgatory and midnight in

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Jerusalem, and though Dante makes no explicit reference to it, it is “plain,” as John Sinclair avers, that he intended correspondence here with “[Christ’s] ascension, according to the accepted tradition, at noon” (Dante’s Paradiso 28). Given this holy correspondence, it is difficult not to think Eucharistically when it comes to the neologism Dante fashions to describe his (increasingly indescribable) migration into the beyond: trasumanar. Says our Poet as he rises toward the eternal spheres: “‘Transhumanize’—it cannot be explained per verba [with words]” (Par. i.70–72). While Musa translates the word as “transhumanize,” Karl Federn proposes that Dante was “transumanato,” which is to say, “carried beyond the limits of human nature, made susceptible of transcendent things” (291). That, according to Dante, this act, this experience, cannot possibly be put into language—and yet has no recourse but to be (Hawkins, Dante 62)—quivers with post-incarnational possibility. At the same time, it discreetly addresses the very nature of transubstantiation. Just prior to his mention of this mode of travel, Dante earnestly grasps for some metaphor by which to describe what no human has ever before experienced. He chooses this: “I felt myself becoming what Glaucus had become tasting the herb that made him like the other seagods there” (Para. i.67–69). Glaucus, an ancient Greek fisherman, who appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was said to have placed his catch on a bed of grass, and lo, the fish miraculously revived and jumped back into the sea (Musa 394). Upon chewing some of the grass himself, Glaucus was transformed into a sea god. To be sure, what Dante describes here could be construed as an interior “expansion of spiritual power into superhuman realms” (Royal 183)—or a “miraculous inner transformation that will prepare him to approach Paradise” (Musa 394). At the same time, Dante’s actions are viably intended, as Benfell argues, to echo those of that “fallen progenitor,” with Dante thus becoming “a redeemed Adam … who reverses the effects of the fall” (54). That the Transfiguration significantly ripples through this canto—and through this entire canticle—can likewise hardly be ignored. The key lies, however, less in the correspondences than in their mutual ineffability. That is, such conversions (man into God, God into bread) can only be accepted without being proven. As Dante will later state—and in what Schnapp calls “a characteristic moment of mystical aphasia”—“‘so, imaging paradise, the sacred poem must make a leap, like he who finds his path cut off ’ [Par. xxiii.61-63])” (Transfiguration 107, emphasis added). No wonder that at the opening of the next canto, Dante warns his readers that the journey from hereon will be arduous, and that perhaps some readers ought not to “attempt the deep: it well could be that losing me, you would be lost yourselves” (Par. ii.5–6). Immediately on the heels of this is Dante’s explicit reference to the

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Bread of Angels, and those who have raised their mouths in search of it will find their boat able “to sail the high seas in the furrow of my wake ahead of parted waters that flow back: (Par. ii.10–15). True, part of the passage’s difficulty is born of the “theologically fraught questions meticulously answered in the manner of the Scholastic masters. … The ‘fit audience, though few’ that stays on board will determine whether these prologue cantos constitute high seas or dead calm” (Hawkins, “Resurrection” 63). And what, for Dante, distinguishes the fit from the unfit audience? According to Royal—and to many others, certainly—Dante is prudently counselling that only readers who have partaken in the rigorous study of philosophy and theology, “may follow him into this new realm without fear of getting lost” (186). But we might also propose that prudence is warranted because that rigorous study is precisely about, and in support of, the Bread of Angels; it is beholden to the Eucharist as literally the Body of Christ. Here, perhaps, it is worth our getting briefly ahead of ourselves. Let us leap forward to Canto v, where Beatrice discourses on God’s greatest gift to humankind—free will—and its bearing on human vows. Vows compel one, after all, to sacrifice one’s own free will. Within her explication on its particulars, Beatrice tells Dante, “[Y]ou must sit at the table yet awhile because the food that you have taken in is tough and takes time to assimilate” (Par. v.37–39). At first glance, her caveat appears to shore up the more conventional interpretation that the Bread of Angels is knowledge, with Beatrice warning the Pilgrim that he must ruminate over the challenging theology and philosophy being afforded him. On the other hand, we could just as well argue the reverse: that knowledge is necessarily subservient to—that it is merely what leads to—the Bread of Heaven, which is Christ. Through his disquisitions with Beatrice, Dante, in other words, is becoming more and more “in step with the Holy Church” (Par. vi.22).6 My intention is not to suggest that all food metaphors in the Comedy should automatically be associated with the Eucharist. Nevertheless, it is intriguing how much more extended and more frequent such metaphors become in Paradise—supple motifs of feeding and eating, of hunger and thirst, of the desire for nourishment—and these, in fact, build, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as the Empyrean is approached. Consider the following exhortation from the Poet to us, his pupils, in Canto x: “Now, Reader, do not leave the table yet, reflect upon what you have only tasted, if you would dine on joy before you tire. I put the food out; now you feed yourself, because the theme which makes of me its scribe demands all my concentration now” (Par. x.22–27). On the surface, this may appear a connotative cousin of the dining metaphor so central to Dante’s Convivio

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(where it is indeed figuratively tantamount to true knowledge). But Dante’s keen attention in Paradise x to our having reached but a foretaste of this integral meal makes space for the possibility of a Eucharistic intention. After all, it is via the Eucharist that Catholics are able to engage with that Love which, to recast one of Dante’s similes is, “at the center of the round” (Par. xiii.51). We might propose something similar regarding Bonaventure’s recitation in Canto xii of Dominic’s biography to the Pilgrim. For there, Bonaventure expressly lauds his rival mendicant for not having studied (like so many others) for the sake of worldly gain but instead “for the love of eternal bread” (Par. xii.82–84). Certainly the Eucharistic resonances need not be—nor are they necessarily—always food-related. Consider, for instance, Dante’s description in Canto ii of the first star, the moon, into whose substances he is brought by his chaperone: “We seemed to be enveloped in a cloud as brilliant, hard, and polished as a diamond struck by a ray of sunlight. That eternal, celestial pearl took us into itself, receiving as water takes in light, its indivisibility intact” (Par. ii.31–36). These metaphors bristle with Eucharistic traces—the eternal pearl (see below on Pearl), the water receiving a ray of light but remaining unbroken. But there is more: for immediately following this, Dante, still speaking, exclaims, If I was body (on earth we cannot think, in terms of solid form within solid, as we must here, since body enters body), then so much more should longing burn in us to see that Being in Whom we can behold the union of God’s nature with our own. Once there we shall behold what we hold true through faith, not proven but self-evident: a primal truth, incontrovertible. (Par. ii.37–45)

This passage, which has been described as “complicated” (Royal 187), sheds some of its difficulty, I think, when seen in the light of transubstantiation. After all, the philosophical law of non-contradiction—that “something cannot both be and not be in the same way at the same time” (187)—is entirely abandoned and willingly invalidated by anyone who believes in the conversion of the bread into Christ’s Body. Dante may well be pointing us here, as Royal claims, “toward a truth that will be as self-evident to us in Heaven as the law of non-contradiction is to us on Earth” (187–188); but perhaps that assessment is incomplete. The axiomatic truth of “Nothing can be and not be at once” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 42) is not truth in the orthodox Catholic conception—though, once again, how it is not truth (and, hence, how something can indeed both be and not be at once) is not accessible scientifically or by reason. Transubstantiation can always only be “proven” by faith.7

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That Dante is soon to encounter the sixth-century Byzantine emperor Justinian I, sometimes known as Justinian the Great, drives home this point. Medieval tradition conceived Justinian as a great emperor who had once theologically denied Christ his humanity, that is, who had seen as false Christ’s “possession of a mortal body capable of casting a shadow” (Raffa, Divine 79). As that emperor, who inhabits the second sphere of Dante’s Paradise, confides to the Pilgrim, I believed that there was but one [divine] nature, and not a second, in Christ, and with that faith I was satisfied; but the blessed [Pope] Agapetus, who was Chief Shepherd, directed me by his words to the true faith. I believed him, and what he held by faith I now see as clearly as thou seest that every contradiction is of false and true … . (Par. vi.14–21, trans. Sinclair)

Justinian, in other words, putatively held for a time to “the Monophysitic Heresy, which accepted the divine nature of Christ but rejected his incarnation in mortal flesh” (Ciardi 643). Yet again, we see Dante, this time apropos what he puts into the emperor’s mouth, playing with—and, even more exactly, against— the idea of incongruous propositions: that is, that if there are two contradictory terms, such as “A is B” and “A is not B,” one must be true and the other false (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 94). According to Ciardi, Dante, in citing this contradiction, is providing an example of that which is self-evident to human intellect: “In Justinian’s present state (informed by divine revelation) the duality of Christ’s nature is as clear to him as is the nature of a logical contradiction to mortal intellect” (644). But I wonder if this oversimplifies a more complex rationale for its inclusion here—namely, a foregrounding of the principle of logic (that something cannot be both one and another at the same time) for the purposes of subverting it. Could Dante, in other words, be cleverly contorting that principle into an incarnational moment? Like the Griffin in Purgatory, we encounter “two natures in one single being” (Purg. xxxi.81)—and accept that contradiction, much as Justinian himself accepted the Incarnation, thus becoming “in step with Holy Church” (Par. vi.22). Intriguingly, at the outset of the ensuing canto, we find Justinian—or, rather, “the substance of that being, over which two lights were joined as one” (Par. vii.4–5, trans. Ciardi) thus signaling his earthly and heavenly greatness (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 112)8—breaking into a hymn: “Hosanna, sanctus Deus sabaoth … ” (Hosanna, holy God of hosts … (Par. vii.1)). Worthy of note is not only Justinian’s terrestrial and celestial in-between-ness, which surely calls to mind the Incarnation and concomitance of Christ’s divinity and humanity; equally of import is its doubling pattern, which will appear again and

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again as we proceed. That is, twin lights of a soul, or even series of souls, will be recurrently united, joined in a dance, and in this way (in the hyphenated unity that Musa furnishes in a line), “en-two-ed into one aureole” (Par. vii.6). While the shades in the Inferno suffered painful inversions of this circumstance, in that they were often doubled by way of being split, here, the opposite occurs. Heaven is the place of unifications and mergers; it is undividing that is now the leitmotif. Nowhere is this more vividly demonstrated than in Canto xiii, where Dante attempts to “to convey the grandeur of the two encircling wreaths of illustrious souls” (Musa 465)—men of wisdom and learning, whom we shall meet shortly. The canto opens with an ambitious representation of the souls “all joined into a double constellation” (Par. xiii.13) and, later, as described by the Pilgrim, as a “double dance encircling me” (Par. xiii.21). But, again, there is more: for, directly on the heels of the latter account, Dante reveals what these shining, speeding synchronized laurels of spirits are singing: “No Bacchic hymn or Paean … but of three Persons in one God they sang and in One Person human and Divine” (Par. xiii.25–27, emphasis added). We are, in other words, fully ensconced in the world of the tri-united,9 of the Trinity with which—with whom—through the Eucharist, Catholics are provided intimate access. Dante, in fact, occasionally vivifies that intimacy through the invention of new grammatical constructions, such as the reflexive verbs “intuassi” (inyou) and “inmii” (inme) (Par. ix.81, trans. Sinclair).10 Such strange expressions, as Sinclair aptly expresses—inadvertently drawing attention to their Eucharistic potentials—are “Dante’s bold and most characteristic way of telling of the soul’s inner fellowship, divine and human, as of a mystery that cannot be told in common speech” (Dante’s Paradiso 143). If by the twelfth century, the particles of the Host for distribution were already “in the form of a coin” (Fitzpatrick 223–224), as historians maintain, imagine, then, the connotative intensification of the circular imagery that so dominates the later solar cantos that comprise x-xiv. We find in these cantos imagistic references to a “crown” (Par. x.65); a “garland” (x.92 and xii.20); a “wheel” (x.145) a “circle” (xi.14, xiv.23, xiv.35), even a “millstone” (xii.3), as well as a geometrical allusion to “circumference” (xiv.75) (Raffa, “Dante’s”). Nowhere is the notion of circular fusing more vividly and movingly envisaged, however, than in the willful joining together of the wise spirits that Dante encounters in these cantos. In short, the Pilgrim finds himself in the middle of a garland of souls, and the spirits engirdling him are “of such brilliance that their lights are distinct from the light of the sun” (Musa 446). These spirits, who are dancing and singing in joy, are renowned for their wisdom and the theological and philosophical contributions they made on earth. They are, in other words,

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the Doctors of the Church, and it is Thomas Aquinas who introduces them to the Pilgrim. They include Albert of Cologne, who had been Thomas’ master, and Peter Lombard, writer of the Sentences.11 (Note that, at this symmetrical point in the Inferno, we were contradistinctively being introduced to the Heretics.) The Dominican Thomas eventually discourses on the “love story of St. Francis and Lady Poverty” (Musa 453), after which another ring joins Thomas’, that second ring “enclosing it: motion with motion, matching song with song … ” (Par. xii.56). From this circle steps forward the Franciscan Bonaventure, who now correspondingly discourses on Dominic. And because the two stories of the two sage mendicants, Francis and Dominic, are “nearly line-by-line parallels,” they are likewise, as Musa evocatively describes, “just as the two rings of souls are twin garlands” (458). (A similar interlaced pattern among spirits appears in Canto ix, where, as “Cunizza commends Folco, so Folco commends Rahab” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 144).) The irony is, of course—and it is one often commented upon by scholars—that, on earth, these two Orders had been intellectual rivals. In the late thirteenth century, Franciscan scholars had actually praised Bonaventure for correcting Thomas’ works (Burr 9).12 No wonder, then, that Sinclair reads the twin device deployed here as an obvious rebuke by Dante “of the jealousies and disputes which often estranged the orders”; this is, Sinclair advises, “Dante’s lesson that love and knowledge, ‘seraphic ardour’ and ‘cherubic light,’ are alike of God, to that ‘to praise one’ of the saints ‘is to speak of both’” (Dante’s Paradiso 172). When it comes to his representations of these sages, in other words, Dante remarkably foregoes taking theological or philosophical sides (Foster 59)—notwithstanding that Thomas, as some scholars argue, stands out as the principle source and authority “from whom Dante gleaned his own theological synthesis” (Collins 197). What such commentators have failed to recognize, however, with respect to this Dantean round between intellectual adversaries is that these men did speak in unison when it came to one particular subject: the Eucharist (Burr 9). As Darwell Stone remarked in his 1909 A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, “Dominican and Franciscan theologians, in spite of the great differences of their thoughts and aims, strove almost equally to present the doctrine of the Eucharist so as to be in harmony with reason” (395). In short, they shared two great convictions about the Eucharistic presence … first, that the real body and blood of the crucified and risen Lord, once slain and now living and glorious, are present under the species of bread and wine to be the spiritual

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food of those who worthily partake of the Sacrament; and, secondly, that this presence is of a spiritual kind, not effected by any natural law, not of a body in any natural condition, uniquely wonderful, without true parallels elsewhere … (History 395)

Considering the differences between their two schools of theology, the harmony in the teachings of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas vis-à-vis the Eucharist is, in Stone’s word, “remarkable” (335). True, some areas of dissent are to be found, such as whether or not a beast that gets hold of a consecrated wafer is eating Christ’s actual body. Nevertheless, on matters pertaining to Eucharistic presence, Bonaventure’s “decisions so closely resemble those of St. Thomas,” says Stone, “that it is unnecessary to go through them in any detail” (335). Still, it is worth our hearing what Bonaventure had to say about the effects of Communion, seeing how closely they echo not only the experience that Dante is presently undergoing as he moves closer and closer to the Empyreal realm, but all that he has undergone in order to get this far: This Sacrament has not its efficacy in any one who does not approach it worthily. And to approach worthily consists in a man preparing himself as he ought … Since this is the Sacrament of union, its first effect is … to unite more closely those who are already united … It is said to unite more closely, because it makes him who approaches worthily more fervent, as a glowing coal, and also stronger, as good food. And, since it makes love more glowing, it aids in removing the ill effects of venial sin. Since it strengthens, it affords help for avoiding all wicked deeds. And, for both reasons, it helps in the increase of virtues and of love most of all. (qtd. in Stone, History 335–336, emphases added)

It is in this heavenly realm, in Canto x more precisely, that we find our first rich and full-fledged reference to that “ultimate mystery of the divine nature, the Holy Trinity, the infinite fulness and eternal fellowship of the Godhead” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 157). At the canto’s commencement, our Poet praises “the created order which reflects its Creator” (Musa 446). Looking on His Son with the Love which the One and the Other eternally breathe forth, the primal and ineffable Power made with such order all that revolves in mind or space that he who contemplates it cannot but taste [sanza gustar] of Him. (x.1–6, trans. Sinclair, emphases added)

The Eucharistic resonance here, and its integral association with the Trinity— at least for humans—is surely clear. The Trinity is heralded in even more pronounced terms in Canto xiii, with explicit reference made “to God as three

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persons in one nature (the ‘tre persone’ of 13.26 corresponding lexically and conceptually to the ‘une e duro e tre’” that we will encounter later, in Canto xiv); further, in both passages, the implied symbolism seems particularly apposite, argues Hart, as in both contexts the spirits celebrating the Trinity “are described as circles (13.28 and 14.35) and are of course among the many ‘circles’ circumscribed by the triune Deity” (“Geometric” 119–120).13 And so, we come full circle—pun intended; for the triune’s association with the circular returns us conceivably to the centrality of the Eucharist in this celestial realm. Additionally reinforced is our presence in a metatextual church. As Watt observes, such a garland of souls recalls the decorated apses of many churches, especially in Ravenna, where “a series of saints depicted in the form of a garland” are notably featured (152). In other words, Dante has placed us not merely at the altar—but, as Watt theorizes, potentially beyond (152). Before we forsake this Sphere of the Sun, there is one more, slightly unsavory topic (at least in these contemporary times) that warrants foregrounding. One of this sphere’s inhabitants is Dominic, who had historical bearing on the crusade against the Cathars and apropos heresy more generally. As a reminder, the Cathars were a sect that rejected Christ’s humanity (for them, the physical world was evil) and so repudiated the Eucharist as well, as the idea of eating Christ’s flesh was abhorrent. The “holy war” waged against them (1209–1229)—recall that the Fourth Lateran Council, where transubstantiation became doctrine, was in 1215—certainly makes its presence felt in Dante’s Paradise. It first emerges explicitly in Canto ix, although, according to some scholars, it has already been “a constant, if only in the background, as the pilgrim and Beatrice pass through the heaven of Venus” (Cantos viii-ix) (Watt 65). One of Venus’ inhabitants, after all, is Folquet de Marseilles, who witnessed the crusade against the Cathars firsthand, and who thereby creates part of what Charles Singleton has called a “charged” field—that is, a setting in which many of the references will lead to the creation of a particular image, in this case the holy war and the holy warrior. Given the renown of the Albigenisan [Cathar] crusade of which Folquet was the leader, the reader focuses less on his conversion from eros to caritas than on his role as a crusader against heresy, and the direction of his discourse ensures this. (Watt 65, emphasis added)

But to return to Dominic: Certainly Dante’s rhetorical attitude to that Doctor of the Church reveals his poetic appreciation for that saint’s role in combatting heresy. For one, Dante uses the language of chivalry to characterize Dominic. Dominic is described “first as one of two champions ( … Par. 12:44) sent to help the Church, and then as ‘a loving vassal of Christian faith’

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( … Par. 12:55–56)” (66). Not only that: his actions regarding his thwarting of heresy are recounted in terms that recall a physical, combative, and warrelated struggle (66). True, Bonaventure rhetorically casts Francis as one of the Church’s “fighting knights” (66), as well. Nevertheless, it was Dominic, along with the Castilian bishop Diego of Osma for whom he served as subprior, who devised a preaching campaign to equal that of their enemies, the Cathars (Lambert 102). In other words, they, like their foes, would preach in poverty (102). Diego died in 1207; but with the aid of Innocent III and in spite of hindrances that ultimately led to the crusade against the Cathars, Dominic established himself in their territory (102). In 1215, he moved to Toulouse and, by 1217, had obtained official recognition for his preaching order (102). How effective—indeed, how fervent—did Dante think this preacher to be? We need only turn to Canto xii: “[A]rmed with doctrine and a zealous will with apostolic sanction, he burst forth—a mighty torrent gushing from on high; sending its crushing force against the barren thickets of heresy, and where they were toughest, it struck with greatest violence” (Par. xii.97–102). To be sure, Dominic was historically not—nor does Dante present him to be—a corporeal persecutor of heretics; his was a spiritual mode of confrontation, not a bodily one. On the other hand, Sinclair proposes that, “in the ferment of ideas which distracted the Church in the thirteenth century and with the convictions which he shared with the whole Christian world of his day, [Dominic] could not but become a persecutor” (Dante’s Paradiso 184). Thus Sinclair states (with commendable frankness, perhaps) that for Dominic, as well as for Dante, heretics persistent in their heresy were deserters from the field in the most imperative of all wars. Dominic, in Dante’s account, was like a zephyr from the west that comes to open the young leaves over Europe, and like a torrent bursting on the heretic thickets, and—this is the final word [Dante says regarding the theme]—the source of streams that still water the garden of the Church. (Dante’s Paradiso 184)

If this truly was, for Dante, “the most imperative of all wars,” we cannot stress enough that, at its center, was the need to quash a heresy that undermined the very core of Catholic belief—and which was, by no temporal accident, now doctrine.

Three and two and one Canto xiv opens with yet another spherical image, this one of concentric rings as produced by “water in a round container mov[ing] center to rim rippling or rim to center, when struck first from within, then from without” (Par. xiv.1–3).

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Could there be an image more lovely and antithetical to the image one finds in xiv’s analogous canto in the Inferno, where a “grieving forest” is described as wreathing around a plain, with a “sad river of blood enclose[ing] the woods” (Inf. xiv.8–11)? Whereas the latter suggests an incapacity for a merging of materials, conjuring perhaps a reversal of the Host, the former breathes with a Trinitarian melding that Dante’s ensuing reference to dancing “holy circles” of spirits will reiterate—leading next, with exhilarating pronouncement, to this: “That One and Two and Three which never ends and ever reigns in Three and Two and One, uncircumscribed and circumscribing all, three separate times was sung by all those spirits, and unbelievingly melodious it sounded—Heaven’s consummate reward” (Par. xiv.28–31). Modestly, from the inner sphere, the voice of Solomon emerges to pay explanatory homage to the increasing brilliance in the heavenly souls’ radiance. Upon subsequently rising to the red glow of Mars, Dante witnesses something so marvelous that he can only liken the experience to the perplexity wise astrologers must have felt when trying to assess the night skies: Just as the Milky Way adorned with stars, some large, some small, gleams white between the Poles, baffling the wisest of astrologers, so, constellated in the depths of Mars, these rays of light crossed in the holy sign which quadrants make when joining in a circle; but here my memory defeats my art: I see that cross as it flames forth with Christ, yet cannot find the words that will describe it. But who takes up his cross and follows Christ will pardon me for what I leave unsaid beholding Heaven’s whiteness glow with Christ. (xiv.97–108, emphases added)

Not only do these lines potentially conjure an image of the even-armed Greek cross, oftentimes depicted in visual depictions of Christ as his “crossed halo” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 208), that crossed halo also readily invokes the sacramental wafer, which, by medieval times, was already being stamped with a cross (Rubin, Corpus 39).14 In this way, it feasibly operates as a symbolic precursor to—as a foretaste of—the sustained Real Presence Dante is to encounter in Canto xxxiii. That in the original Italian of the passage quoted earlier, the word “Cristo” repeats thrice at the end of alternate lines— i.e., … ingegno/ … Cristo/ … degno/ … Cristo/ … lasso/ … Cristo/ … basso— rhythmically imbues those lines with a Trinitarian ecstasy, while serving likewise as a rhetorical testament to what for Dante was the ultimate love: Christ’s willing sacrifice of his own body. Or, in the more fruitfully suggestive words of Royal, “we see the body of the perfect man courageously consenting to what is necessary to redemption and perfection” (204). While individuals today may be more inclined to recall the more human Christ who befriended

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and brought hope to the destitute of this world, Dunbar suggests that “in the Middle Ages the central fact of Christ’s life was his death, presented forcefully to Dante in the cross which he sees in the glow of Mars” (67, emphasis added). And yet, this canto’s vision of Christ is only the first of three, fittingly enough. Second and third visions will appear in the twenty-third and thirty-third cantos—and these, according to Collins (whose descriptions will suffice for now), will transport us from that first Christ flashing forth “in the company of all those who shared in His sufferings”; to a second Christ “in His triumphant glory” and victorious over death; and a third highlighting “the mystery of the Incarnation in the form of a flash of lightning, in which Dante will see the union of humanity and divinity in Christ” (263). The upward trajectory that one can infer in these visions is also reflected within Canto xiv itself, in the description Dante provides us of what seem like dust motes, “particles of matter mov[ing] straight or aslant, some swift, some floating slow” (Par. xiv.115–116). Could Dante be alluding to the light that comes from the east and to “an effect common in buildings with limited illumination” (Watt 157)? In this sense, Dante is reprising our presence in a metatextual church, where a play of light is essential to orienting oneself (157). Perhaps we are even aerially moving past the crucifix suspended in the apse of such a church—soaring upward, beyond Christ’s church-bound terrestrial representation. We are traveling beyond the suffering conveyed in, say, Cimabue’s Crucifixion, in the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence, to representations more gloriously celestial, such as one finds on the gilt Byzantine ceilings of Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale. Further along in the Martian realm, Dante encounters his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida. It is an encounter the Poet likens to that of Aeneas, in Virgil’s epic, meeting up with his father Anchises in the Elysian Fields. “O sanguis meus” (O my own blood!) (Par. xv.28), Cacciaguida cries out upon seeing his descendant. His exclamation may seem little more than a chance sacramental allusion, given that it is the same Latin phrase Anchises uses “to designate the spirit of Julius Caesar whom he urges to refrain from waging war against his homeland” (Raffa, “Dante’s”). Given the vision of the crucified Christ that preceded this encounter, however, and that, here, we have a son and father-figure brought together in the hereafter (“O my branch … I was thy root,” Cacciaguida informs Dante (xv.88–89, trans. Sinclair 219)), we need wonder if what is being suggested is something more powerful. Part of the rationale for that inference lies in the next three cantos, in which Cacciaguida—who first relays that he was martyred while on crusade—recounts the history of his sweet, uncorrupted (and bygone) Florence, as well as their family’s genealogy. Several notable allusions to thirst and to food, to taste and to nutriment appear in these cantos. Between

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tercets otherwise dense with appellative markers, we find Cacciaguida referring to his eternal gazing on God as creating within him a “sweet thirstiness” (Par. xv.66) and Beatrice warning her charge, “[L]earn to speak your thirst in order that your cup be filled for you” (xvii.10–12). Soon the mood grows more somber, with unequivocal references to “the Lamb of God who takes away sins [having been] slain” (xvii.22, trans. Sinclair) and to that plausibly most famous of the Comedy’s lines, in which the exilic torment the Poet will have to face post1300 is prophesied: “You shall be forced to leave behind those things you love most dearly … you will know how salty is the taste of others’ bread” (xvii.55– 59). Indeed, one could argue that the Pilgrim is here being portrayed as a “type of Christ,” who is asking his substitute father for the “what” of his duty, for his mission “in the midst of predestined trouble” (Dunbar 68). As for Cacciaguida’s reply to his great-great-grandson: “[D]o not resort to lies, let what you write reveal all you have seen … Though when your words are taken in at first they may taste bitter, but once well-digested they will become a vital nutriment” (xviii.127–132). If “Dante’s external fortunes of pain and exile are to typify the passion of Christ, so his mission,” argues Dunbar—similarly undertaken in knowledge and love—is, like Christ’s, “to give food. Against the background prepared by empire and church, Dante’s voice, bitter at first, is to become and to remain a source of nutriment to both throughout the future” (68–69). Many commentators have contended that “the source for Dante’s image of his word as being digested” was likely Boethius. That early sixth-century philosopher-cum-prisoner had once written, after all, that the only remedies remaining to him were “like those that sting on the tongue, but sweeten once taken within” (qtd. in Benfell 58). Then again, Dante’s source could just as well be biblical, given that Ezekiel, when given a book upon commission to deliver God’s word to Israel, is told to eat it: “eat this book … and go speak to the children of Israel. And I opened my mouth, and he caused me to eat that book … And I did eat it: and it was sweet as honey in my mouth (Ezek. 2.8–3.3)” (qtd. in Benfell 59). Similarly, in Apocalypse, John is instructed to eat a book given to him by an angel, the passage noticeably echoing Ezekiel: “And I took the book from the hand of the angel, and ate it up: and it was in my mouth, sweet as honey” (qtd. in Benfell 60). Could it be that, through these patent allusions to eating, as Benfell argues, Dante is implying that “the words of his poem function in a way analogous to scriptures” (60)? Dante’s readers, too, must “digest” his words and his readers’ “reaction to the taste of the words will depend greatly on [their] spiritual disposition” (60). If it is the case that Dante is attempting in Paradise “to tie his poem to the scriptures” and to assert “their similarities in the way that they

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signify, in the source of their inspiration, and in their effects on readers” (60), this is not merely because, as in the words of Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), “holy scripture is our food and drink” (qtd. in Benfell 59). The inspiration, I would propose, has as much, if not more, to do with what is to be eaten. Such an assertion may appear on the surface sinuously thin or far-fetched, but it gains traction, I think, in light of what Dante’s comparatively lengthy encounter with Cacciaguida culminates in—namely, a highly charged reference to “the bread our Father’s love denies to no one” (Par. xviii.129). Here, we have reached Canto xviii, which opens with Dante and Cacciaguida, Dante’s “blessed mirror,” rapt in their respective thoughts—“tasting” them, as it were (xviii.1–3, trans. Sinclair). Beatrice implores the Pilgrim not only to look into her eyes but to listen to Cacciaguida, as there too, she says, Paradise is to be found. Absorbed in his ancestor’s impressive roll call of warrior-saints— Charlemagne, Roland, William of Orange, and more—the Pilgrim realizes only after the fact that they have ascended to the sphere of Jupiter. There, recounts the Poet, “blessèd beings were circling as they sang, turning themselves first to a D, then I, then into L. … The first words of the message, verb, and noun: DILIGITE IUSTITIAM; then came QUI IUDICATIS TERRAM after them” (xviii.76–93)—which is to say, “Love justice, you who judge the earth” (Musa 500). On top of the last letter and indeed out of that M, lights recombine and reconstitute into the shape of an eagle. So compelling is this vision of Justice to our Poet that he embarks on a bitter tirade against Avignon Pope John xxii, who would become head of the Church in 1316: It used to be that wars were waged with swords, but now one fights withholding here and there the bread our Father’s love denies to none. And you who write only to nullify, remember that Peter and Paul, who died to save the vineyard you despoil, still live. (Par. xviii.127–132, emphasis added)

This is hardly mere metonymy, mere bread as a figurative stand-in for the Word of God. This bread has fairly precise historical grounding, for almost certainly, the allusion is to “John xxii’s frequent issuance of excommunications and interdicts, by which the innocent faithful (God’s beloved children)”—as Collins refers to them—“were denied the Eucharistic Bread of Life” (166). This pope, alas, had discovered a convenient source of revenue by punishing his enemies through interdicts that denied them the sacraments and, then, remitting those interdicts for cash (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 264).15 Dante may have been thinking, even more particularly, of the pope’s 1317 excommunication of his own patron and friend, Cangrande della Scala, who was “one of the

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Ghibelline lords in northern Italy who resisted the aggressive Avignon papacy” (Collins 166)—and the man to whom Dante dedicated Paradise. What we may have here, thus, is a somewhat unsubtle indictment of what Dante clearly perceived as a papal transgression, in John XXII’s withholding the Eucharist from Catholics. The fact that this tirade is precipitated by the sight of an eagle is not without sacramental puissance either. For medieval audiences, the first association of the eagle was not “his significance as a patriotic ensign,” but rather “his nature as the one living creature able to look with unshut eye upon the sun” (Dunbar 71)—the sun, of course, being a metaphor for God. “Do the same thing, O Man,” implores the twelfth-century Latin bestiary The Book of Beasts, “you who are clothed in the old garment and have the eyes of your heart growing foggy. Seek for the spiritual fountain of the Lord and lift up your mind’s eyes to God—who is the fount of justice—and then your youth will be renewed like the eagle’s” (105–106). As for who can rise to “this high empery,” Dante is suitably straightforward. As the Eagle informs his Pilgrim, “none ever rose who had not faith in Christ, before or after he was crucified. But then there are all those who cry, ‘Christ! Christ!’ and at the Judgment Day will be less close to Him than will those who know not Christ” (xix.103–108). Note that, yet again, alternate lines end in a treble of Christ ( … regno/ … Cristo/ … legno/ … Cristo/ … prope/ … Cristo). More vital, however, is what Dante is contending here, which is that “[t]o know about Christ,” as Moevs finely explicates, “is not to know Christ” (174). But it is what Moevs says directly following this that integrally bears on a Eucharistic reading of the Comedy: “for Dante, the touchstone of salvation, and the resolution of the mystery of life, consists in the capacity to recognize Christ, which means either to be awake to (to expect), or to awaken to, the revelation of the infinite in the finite, the divine in the human, that is Christ” (174).16 How far we have come from the boiling pitch of Inferno xxi and the corporeal prison that was, in Hell, the human body (eternally weighed down and consuming itself). Here, all is effulgence; and in the sphere of Saturn, we now gaze upon the radiant ascension of globes such as Peter Damian and Benedict. These globes will precede Dante and Beatrice up the Golden Ladder which, much “like the contemplative life, soars to the summit of God’s glory” (Ciardi 787). If God’s ways are “ultimately cut off from human understanding,” as Peter Damian instructs Dante before their mutual scaling, odd comfort is to be taken, at least, in the trifling orb of earth that Dante eventually witnesses from his high perch. As he exclaims, “My vision travelled back through all the spheres, through seven heavens, and then I saw our globe; it made me smile, it looked so paltry there. … [that] puny threshing-ground that drives us mad” (Par.

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xxii.133–152). Perhaps this is meant to put into perspective all the bitter criticism to which we have heretofore been made privy: the Church’s self-indulgence, as recounted by Peter Damian; the indolent, covetous members of Benedict’s order who, as Benedict himself carps, ignore his Rule. If we deem Dante more wily, perhaps this smile at the paltry earth is intended to wipe the Poet’s canvas clean of his past acridity, given that he is about to enter the sphere of the fixed stars. Either way, we now enter a realm of heaven from which emerges, as G. Grabher evocatively describes, “a succession of images in which light, song, motion, form and feeling melt into a whole in which, by a divine miracle, the unspeakable has found the most definite expression, and an atmosphere of paradise is created which enraptures the eyes and the soul” (qtd. in Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 340). Hawkins likewise endeavors to articulate what Dante is doing with increasing inarticulateness when positing that Paradise is “gradually writ[ing] itself into silence: the entire canticle … constantly replaces its images and fictions, one after the other, not in the hopes of ever describing the ineffable, but rather to exhaust the possibility of expression” (Dante 218). We might additionally suggest that Dante is instrumentally dissolving the material world into the immaterial; that he is rendering the flesh that swarms and rots and feeds upon itself in Hell into that of the Eucharistic Flesh, which is of substance unseen. That our Pilgrim earlier shared with Benedict queries regarding the resurrection of the body was, no doubt, in part to foreshadow where we find ourselves now: facing the light of Christ Triumphant followed by Christ having ascended. (This canto’s numerical analog in Inferno is surely by no accident where we find Caiaphas—who urged Pontius Pilate to crucify Christ—restrained in a decidedly non-ascendable position: “crucified and transfixed by three stakes to the ground” (Musa 123). Between these two—that is, at the interstice between Christ’s light and his ascension—Beatrice beckons Dante to look straight into her face, as only now does he possess the power to endure her smile. Intriguingly, it is at this point that Dante refers to his poem as sacrato, sacred—or, in Musa’s translation, as consecrated: If at this moment all the tongues of verse, which [the Muse of songs to the gods] Polyhymnia and her sisters nourished with their sweet milk, sang to assist my art, their singing would not come to one-thousandth part of the truth about her sacred smile nor how it set her holy face aglow; so I find that my consecrated poem describing Paradise will have to make a leap, like one who finds his road is blocked. (Par. xxiii.55–63)

At Beatrice’s bidding, Dante finally withdraws from his absorption with her face to find that Christ himself has leapt, in a manner of speaking—which is to say, he has withdrawn, ascended. With Christ departed, the Pilgrim is left admiring

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what that lord terrestrially left: “the Rose in which the Word of God took on flesh” (the Virgin Mary, in other words) and “the lilies” (the apostles), “whose fragrance led mankind down the good path” (xxiii.73–75). Watt recommends that the Rose “recalls the rose window found in many of the churches that Dante had seen, such as the rose-wheel window in the cathedral at Siena, Santa Maria della Scala” (159), in which the biography of the Virgin is recounted. I would additionally suggest that earlier traces in Paradise of the mother-andchild motif—via Dante’s neologism “enwombing” (m’iventro) (xxi.84) and his comparison of Beatrice “to a reassuring mother” (xxi.1–15) (Raffa, “Dante’s”)— and, soon, to his likening the radiances to “an infant that stretches out its arms to its mother after it has taken the milk” (xxiii.121–123, trans. Sinclair)—are, in part, a build-up to venerating not only the Virgin Mary as the Mother of Christ, but, even more particularly, as the womb and spiritual oven in which the bread of Christ was baked. While this may strike today’s readers as a queasy, overwrought association, numerous medieval Christian images exist today that evocatively “valorise Mary’s womb, as hearth or oven where Christ’s body was leavened, as Christian imagery put a positive aspect on this particular part of the body with its Eucharistic resonances” (Bale). As we shall see, this motif will not only proliferate as we ascend higher but will do so all the way through to the poem’s final canto. First, however, that Lady of Heaven must herself ascend to the Empyrean, though regrettably Dante’s eyes are “not able to follow the crowned flame [rising] after her seed” (xxiii.118–120, trans. Sinclair). That at this point the white radiances sing Regina coeli, a hymn to the Virgin Mary traditionally sung during Easter week, only adds to the ascension theme. Consider its words: “O Queen of Heaven, rejoice, for He whom thou wast worthy to bear rose as He said” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 338). This lush revering of the Lady of Heaven arguably engenders in the reader a desire—nay, an expectation—of a forthcoming encounter with Christ. Indeed, scholars like Collins explicitly comment on how, at this point in the rise, the Pilgrim “desire to see Christ grows more intense,” with the face of Christ becoming “the image that dominates the higher [Dante] ascends. Expressions such as ‘seeing’ and ‘tasting’ become more frequent as Dante’s desires and longings—his hunger and thirst for divine love— are intensified and gradually satisfied” (271). Before Dante will be permitted “to taste that heavenly food,” however, as Collins appropriately warns, “he must pass an ‘entrance exam’ on three fundamental virtues necessary for any Christian: faith, hope and love” (Collins 272). And so, while in the Garden of Christ’s Triumph, Dante is put through a

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grinding Scholastic-like ringer—and by the apostle Peter, no less. Of note is the way the canto highlighting this examination begins: with Beatrice addressing the fixed stars’ spirits as “those chosen to feast at the great supper of the Lamb of God Who feeds you, satisfying all your needs” (Par. xxiv.1–3). Hence that which in the language of the Church Militant does not physically nourish—the Eucharist—becomes, in the language of the Church Triumphant, that which is all-sating (see Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 355). Just as central to Canto XXIV are Dante’s proclamation of the faith and his declaration of his orthodoxy, which correspondingly ripple with Eucharistic undertones. When the Pilgrim cites Paul, for instance, in declaring that “faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen” (xxiv.64–64, trans. Sinclair 347), does his statement not resound with the Catholic belief in the Eucharist as the Body of Christ? And when Peter asks if Dante has in his purse the money whose “alloy and weight … have been well examined”—with Dante responding, “I have indeed, so bright and round that of its mintage I am no doubt” (xxiv.83–87, trans. Sinclair)—does this not instantly bring to the Eucharist-cognizant mind that “inestimable gem” (xxiv.89), its brightness and roundness?17 And later, when Dante, remarking on the Good, refers to it not as “the Alpha and Omega of the scripture love reads to me” (as it often appears in translation [xxx.vi.17, trans. Sinclair]) but rather to “Alfa ed O,” could that not, yet again, be in order to draw attention through that O to a Eucharistic brightness and roundness? (Recall, too, that at this point in the Inferno, we met Vanni Fucci, who willingly acknowledged having “stole[n] the treasure of the sacristy” (Inf. xxiv.138).) The emphasis on the mysteries of the faith do not stop here, however; for at the end of this canto, Dante pronounces, in Creed-like fashion, his belief in the three eternal Persons: “[A]nd these I believe to be one Essence,” he informs us, “so one and so three-fold that it admits agreement both with are and is” (Par. xxiv.139–141, trans. Sinclair). If it is true, as an early, credible tradition maintains, that Dante was at one time brought under inquiry for heresy, then this canto, as Sinclair proposes, “takes the character in part of an apologia” (Dante’s Paradiso 356). It operates as an act of self-vindication—and against a charge that Dante regarded as grave (356). In Inferno xxv, where humans merged with reptiles, such that two heads were fused, with “features from each flow[ing] and bend[ing] into one face … ” (xxv.70–72), the confrontation was with what we might call a “rotten Lamb,” an ungodly, rotten Agnus. One of that realm’s inhabitants, to remind the reader, was Agnèl, who, much like his fellow thieves, took in life “the substance of others, transforming it into [his] own” (Ciardi 196). The name

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of this Florentine about whom nothing more is known (Musa 136) literally means Lamb. Was Dante then intentionally creating an inverted parallel between the rotten Lamb of Hell in Inferno xxv and the True Lamb of Paradise xxv—vivified here in its allegorical incarnation as the Pelican? In short, James quizzes Dante on issues pertaining to the second of the theological virtues, Hope, and upon successful completion of his exam, Dante witnesses a “brilliant splendor rush to reach the two circles” of James along with Peter, who are whirling in dance (Par. xxv.106–107). “This is the one who lay upon the breast of our own Pelican,” Beatrice reveals to Dante; “he is the one who from the Cross assumed the great bequest” (xxv.112–114). That newly arrived splendor is John, in other words, the apostle who, at the Last Supper, rested his head on “our own Pelican,” Christ. Christ as Pelican was a familiar trope in the hymns and liturgy of the Middles Ages (Collins 272), as in those times the “pelican was believed to nourish its young by striking its breast until it bled and then giving them its blood” (Ciardi 823). In fact, one finds Christ represented as such in one of the Eucharistic hymns, the Adoro te devote, attributed to Thomas Aquinas: “O Loving Pelican, Lord Jesus/Cleanse me, a sinner, with your blood,/Of which one drop can save/The whole world from all sin” (qtd. in Collins 272). In other accounts, the pelican is even said to “feed its own flesh to its young” (Treherne, “Liturgical” 149) and to revive “her dead young with her blood” (Collins 272).18 This is also the canto, in an admittedly more peripheral vein, in which Dante makes figurative use of another bird, the dove: And then a light began to move toward us out of the sphere which had produced that rare first fruit of Christ’s own vicarage on earth; whereat, my lady, radiant with joy, said to me: “Look, look there! You see the Baron [John the Apostle] who draws souls to Galicia down on earth.” As when a dove alights beside its mate, and it begins to coo and circle round the other in expression of its love, even so did I behold one glorious and great lord greet the other as the two [Peter and James] sang praises … (Par. xxv.13–24)

One might postulate that these doves are subtly heralding the arrival of the Incarnation—at least as represented presently as the Loving Pelican. Moreover, by the 1100s, it had become customary in Italy to hang a metal-sculpted dove above the altar, and in this dove reserved19 Hosts were stored (Eucharistic 87). The vessel’s first appearance, which dovetails (no pun intended) with Berengar’s threatening position regarding the true nature of the Host, signaled not only the Host’s presence but also that of the Holy Spirit (89). In this sense, the

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dove—whose highpoint was in the thirteenth century, as inventories and extant artifacts amply demonstrate (87)—was “an attempt by the defenders of the ‘real presence’ position in the eucharistic controversy to provide visual support of their position” (89). The allusions to bodily sacrifice—and to bodily disembodiment—do not terminate with these winged creatures, however. Dante’s examiners, Peter, James, and John (also the names Dante gave his three sons, incidentally (Raffa, “Dante’s”)) appear together precisely because they embody “the cornerstone of his hope” (Jacoff, “Our Bodies” 120). They were, after all, the three apostles who witnessed the incarnated Christ’s Transfiguration, when, atop a hill, Christ’s material body was absorbed by his divine body, and his garments became glistering and exceedingly white, with God intoning: “This is my beloved Son: Hear ye Him.”20 And yet, we must wait for that beloved Son finally to appear before us: beyond Dante being examined by John on both the intensity and source of Charity (that source, of course, being God); beyond both Peter expressing apoplectic indignation at papal corruption and Dante questioning a new arrival, Adam— all while chants of “Holy! Holy! Holy!” (xxvi.67–69) and “Hosanna” (xxviii.94), so familiar to the Mass, interspersedly peal through the air. Or, perhaps it is more that these, which give way to Dante being transported to God’s abode, the Empyrean, are exquisitely leading to the remarkable appearance of someone often underappreciated by modern Comedy commentators, the saint Bernard. But first, we should acknowledge the significance of the ninth sphere of the Primum Mobile, where the nine orders of Angels are to be found, and to which Dante is himself conveyed by way of the power of Beatrice’s joyously burning gaze. This ninth sphere gives all the others their movement. As Beatrice explains, “The nature of the universe, which holds the centre still and moves all else around it”—that center being the Ptolemaic earth—“begins here as from its starting-point, and this heaven has no other where but the Divine Mind, in which is kindled the love that turns it and the virtue which it rains down. Light and love enclose it in a circle … ” (xxvii.105–112, trans. Sinclair). Spiritually charged explanations of the mechanics of the physical universe ensue before we find ourselves past that ninth—and last—and swiftest—of the circles of the heavens; past those orders of angels on whom Beatrice willingly discourses, correcting several former teachings by “preachers [who] lie!” (xxix.100). And then, the nine circles of Heaven disappear, with “one star here and there … fading from our sight” (xxx.5–6). “We have gone beyond,” Beatrice remarks, “from

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greatest sphere to heaven of pure light” (xxx.38–39). After this “dawning” of God’s light, which obscures all other light (Ciardi 865), Beatrice promises the Pilgrim that here he shall see “the one and the other soldiery of Paradise, and the one in that aspect in which thou shalt see them at the last judgement” (xxx.43–45, trans. Sinclair). In other words, Dante will be permitted to see the Blessed of the Empyrean as they shall appear on Judgment Day, which is to say, wearing their mortal bodies. And indeed, Dante does—but not before witnessing “a light that was a river flowing light within light” (xxx.61–62, trans. Ciardi), and from which Beatrice instructs him to drink. This he does more eagerly than a baby seeking “his mother’s milk” (xxx.84). Only then do those Blessed appear to him, and they do so “systematically arranged in an immense white rose,” which he sees indirectly, as a reflected vision (Raffa, “Dante’s”). Perhaps Ciardi describes this three-dimensional flowering best: “Dante sees them … ranked tier on tier in a huge stadium that gives for the appearance of an enormous white rose basking in the eternal springtime of the direct light of God” (867). Watt notes that the “image of the river of light transforming itself into a circle,” which can be found in the baptistery in Florence as well as in frescoes of the Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome, symbolizes “the preparation for the coming of Christ” (161). If this is so, is it not likely that Dante’s Tuscan readers would have anticipated the poetical coming of Dante’s Christ—and, by this, I mean in a manner more evocatively foregrounded than what we get if we allot only a surface reading of Christ’s presence to Paradise’s end ? But before we reach that end, we must first meet the last of the Pilgrim’s three otherworldly guides and the one ultimately responsible for getting Dante to the hallowed highpoint of his journey. The manner by which Bernard replaces Beatrice is indubitably reminiscent of that by which Beatrice replaced Virgil. It occurs as Dante is witnessing that limpid white rose of God’s Elect, “those whom with His own blood Christ made His bride” and those who were spreading “the peace and ardor of the love they gathered with their wings in flight to Him” (xxxi.3–18). Joyously stupefied, overcome by their “lovededicated faces,” and with a “new-kindled eagerness” to discern more clearly the workings of those blessed ranks (xxx.49, 56), Dante turns to Beatrice— only to find her gone. While forewarned that Virgil was to be replaced by Beatrice, Dante finds Beatrice unexpectedly replaced by “an elder in the robes of Heaven’s saints. His eyes, his cheeks … filled with the divine joy of the blest, his attitude with love that every tender-hearted father knows” (xxx.60–63). Nothing in the poem prepares us for this replacement, as Botterill tells us, alleging further that “nothing overtly justifies it”; the “episode is well under way before Bernard’s identity is ever made manifest,” he continues, “and over

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almost before the full extent of this baffling complexity has had time to sink in” (51). Only some dozen tercets later does the Virgin Mary’s reference to that “faithful one, Bernard” (xxx.102) make explicit his identity. (As for Beatrice: she has returned, the Virgin Mary reassures Dante, to her proper tier in the Rose, whence, after smiling thankfully at Dante’s prayer in her honor, Beatrice raises her gaze to that “Eternal Light” (xxx.93).) But does Bernard’s mode of appearance really lack justification? Is it not arguably the most effective means by which to capture the startling hierophanic power of a miraculous appearance, akin to what the apostles must have felt when the transfigured and, later, resurrected Christ astonishingly appeared to them? If what follows is truly the “perfect consummation” of Dante’s otherworldly journey, as Bernard calls it, and since Bernard has been sent to escort Dante to its perfect end, one wonders why so many critics have devalued Bernard or even, on some occasions, ignored him completely. Even Auerbach and Singleton pass over him in silence, as Seung observes: “He is seldom even mentioned in the voluminous allegorical exegeses on Virgil and Beatrice; he has long entered the realm of oblivion” (“Bonaventure’s” 136). The same applies to more recent scholarship. Consider the following passage from a 2007 essay in which Dante’s guides are hermeneutically parsed: In the Commedia, Vergil guides when the issue at stake is praxis, and Beatrice guides when the issue at stake is theoria. Beatrice’s surpassing of Vergil in the itinerary of the Commedia does not signify the fact that Christian truth surpasses philosophy, for she herself is a philosopher. Vergil and Beatrice embody, respectively, the philosophical concern for things “within our control” and the philosophical concern for things “outside human control.” (Stone, “Dante” 150)

Articulate and analytically cogent as its author, Gregory Stone, is here—and it need be said that, in his more comprehensive analysis of the guides in his book, Stone does address Bernard (see History)—we still have to ask: Where is Bernard? Why is his presence as guide—as the guide who gets Dante to God—completely overlooked? Is it perhaps because, in our more secular age, preferred concentration is given to the more philosophically oriented, and sometimes even romantically invested, figure of Beatrice, as well as to the classical and literary one of Virgil? Is Bernard too Catholic perhaps, too much a figure who, to quote Dante, “burn[s] with love’s fire” for that “Queen of Heaven,” the Virgin Mary (xxxi.100–101)? Granted, he appears in only three cantos, but the fact that they are the last three—and that they are three— indubitably speaks to a spiritual and Trinitarian significance that ought not to be minimized or dismissed.

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And there are other worthy questions, too: Why can’t Beatrice be the one to see the Pilgrim’s journey to its consummation? If it is because she was not a recognized member of the Elect, then why is Thomas Aquinas not serving instead in that capacity? The answer may be that Dante wanted a contemplative and not a Doctor of Theology (however Angelic that Doctor might have been) to accompany him to the end of his pilgrimage. Indeed, as Pietro Alighieri, who annotated his own father’s work, discerned, the metaphor in operation via Bernard “is that we cannot see and know God through theology, but [only] through grace and contemplation. Hence, through Bernard, that is through contemplation, [Dante] obtains from the Virgin the privilege of seeing such things as cannot be apprehended through the written word” (qtd. in Gilson 237). Nevertheless, scholars continue to be mystified by the preceding questions—and sometimes for good reason. After all, Dante’s citations elsewhere in his writings of Bernard are scarce and, so, “there has traditionally been a certain puzzlement over why Dante should have turned to him as his guide in the concluding portions of the poem”; some suggest Dante chose Bernard only because Dante “recognized him to be the leading figure in mystical theology, not because of any firm grounding in his works. Another view, frequent in modern commentaries, is that it was Bernard’s devotion to the Virgin that led Dante to choose him as guide” (Hollander, Dante 128–129). As for why Thomas Aquinas—or, better yet, Francis of Assisi—would have made an insufficient guide, one theory is that Bernard alone was a “scourge of Popes,” having even openly vilified a contemporaneous pope, Eugenius, for his lack of administrative skill and experience (Wilson 308). Another is that, while Beatrice prepared Dante’s way through knowledge, Bernard is now necessary because that journey can only reach its completion through love (Gilson 237). If Bernard’s character appears somewhat bipolar, oscillating between public admonitions and contemplative love, that is quite in keeping with the complexity of his character—at least as that character comes through in his own writings when assessed besides those of his hagiographers and historians. As Vossler puts it, Bernard, who was pressed into active service in order to preach against heretics, “was neither the fanatical and hieratic preacher of the Crusades,”21 nor the “penitent monk”; rather, he was “that which unites and explains both— Bernard the devout mystic” (66). It was the Bernard who was known as being “‘suffused with benign joy,’ ‘with pious mien’—who exerted his influence upon Dante. He fixed his attention not upon the saint’s strange and contradictory exterior, but upon the spiritual centre of his nature, and assigned to him the last and decisive word that quiets the inquiring mind with loving faith” (66).

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As a result, we ought to address him biographically before hypothesizing further why Dante might have selected him to bring the Pilgrim’s holy assignation to its completion, to usher in what our Poet himself describes as a “rise into the vision of God’s Ray” (xxxi.99). The index of Bernard’s (1091–1153) intellectual and spiritual influence on his age is best evidenced, perhaps, by the number of manuscripts of his work that have survived into the current day—more than 1500—with nearly half of those dating from his own time (Sommerfeldt 3). No wonder, then, that to study Bernard’s age, as Sommerfeldt argues, requires studying Bernard himself (3). Although mystical union may not be a theme with which many can relate, Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs foregrounds that sort of union precisely. As a mode of contemplation and route to truth, it “entails a sublime and mysterious type of experience that most of us today would hesitate to claim we have had” (Tamburello 128). Bernard summarized what he conceived to be the three steps to truth—three steps that could be said to inflect Dante’s own Trinitarian impulses in the Comedy: We climb to the first by the toil of humility, to the second by deep feeling of compassion, and to the third by the ecstasy of contemplation. On the first step we experience the severity of truth, on the second its tenderness, on the third its purity. Reason brings us to the first as we judge ourselves; compassion brings us to the second when we have mercy on others; on the third the purity of truth sweeps us up to the sight of things invisible. (qtd. in Tamburello 64)

Could Dante be drawing on his readers’ collective memory of this triadic ascension? Surely, as soon we shall see, ecstatic contemplation of the Host was the pinnacle of Mass and at its core lay in the witnessing of things invisible. Dante himself takes as a focal point the saint’s contemplative character after all, when, in Canto xxxi, he describes how, in gazing at Bernard who had lived “in the world, through contemplation,” he—Dante—“tasted of that peace” (xxxi.109–111). In his treatise De diligendo Deo (“On the Need to Love God”), Bernard emphasizes the need for human affection to “melt and be transfused totally into God’s will” (qtd. in Dronke 163). This seems to capture something of Dante’s own ecstatic intention, both spiritually and poetically, in Paradise. Sometimes, their figurative allusions could well be swapped for one another, such as when Bernard likens a coalescing with God’s will to how “a small drop of water, infused in much wine, seems wholly to lose its nature as it takes on the wine’s savour and colour, and as iron when white-hot becomes most like fire, having shed its pristine form” (qtd. in Dronke 163).

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When it came to the politics of the Church, however—especially vis-à-vis schisms induced by princes and kings—Bernard was far more tonally adamant than mystical or mellifluous.22 “[T]here must be no division within the Church,” he wrote. “She must remain whole and integral according to her inherited right” (qtd. in Sommerfeldt 10). Of particular interest for us is that one of the stories regarding how he healed a schism explicitly involves the Eucharist. Failing to use persuasion to convince an aggressive duke, William of Aquitaine, Bernard wielded a decisively more powerful weapon: Christ. As told in the Lives of the Saints, [Bernard] went to the church to say Mass, while the duke and other schismatics stood at the door, as under excommunication. The kiss of peace before the Communion had been given, when suddenly Bernard laid the wafer of the Host on the paten, turned, and holding it high advanced with it to the door, his eyes flashing and his countenance all on fire. “Hitherto,” he said, “I have entreated and besought you, and you have despised me. Other servants of God have joined their prayers to mine, and you have not regarded them. Now the Son of the Virgin, the Lord and Head of that Church which you persecute, comes in person to see if you will repent. He is your judge, at whose name every knee bows, in Heaven, in Earth, and in Hell … ” (“St. Bernard”)

The terrified duke abandoned the schism, surely illustrating not only Bernard’s capacity for persuasion—even conversion, we might say—but why Dante might have had such an affinity for this saint. Dante was writing Paradise right at the time of one of the most notorious schisms in the Church, when the French pope Clement v refused to rule in Rome, moving the papacy to Avignon, now in modern-day France. But Bernard’s messianic methods of converting the duke dually reinforce the Realness of the Presence of Christ in the consecrated wafer. While the fact that Bernard is often depicted in manuscript illustrations as “austere and emaciated” or “in a posture of prayer or contemplation, tonsured and wearing a monastic habit” (Botterill 51) may seem unremarkable, what is remarkable, I would argue, is that the saintly attributes included in such illuminations as markers of his identification comprise not only “a white dog (from a story in the Vita prima), a mitre at Bernard’s feet (symbolizing his repeated rejection of offers of bishopries), [and] a bee-hive (for the ‘doctor mellifluus’)” but also “a sacramental wafer” (51). In other words, the wafer with which he won over the schismatic duke made it into the symbolic library of his achievements, and this would not have been lost on the medieval audience encountering him in Dante’s Comedy. This was an audience, after

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all, as A.E. Taylor states, that “thought and felt in symbols, and the sequence of [that audience’s] thought moved as frequently from symbol to symbol as from fact to fact” (qtd. in Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 459). Recounted in one of Bernard of Clairvaux’s early biographies is yet another Eucharist-related story. Apparently a monk of Bernard’s order was struggling to believe in the Real Presence, but at Bernard’s somewhat enraged bidding—“Go and take the Holy Communion with my faith!”—the monk was immediately “enlightened by the Holy Father’s merit” (Coulton 52). While Bernard’s own writings may “contain surprisingly few allusions to the Eucharist,” perhaps it is stories like these, compounded by the Host as one of Bernard’s medieval attributes, that have led to scholarly agreement that Bernard concurred “with the writers of his time in general in their insistence on the reality of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist and on the spiritual character of this presence” (Stone, History 301). In his Life of St. Malachy, Bernard refers explicitly to the Eucharist as the gift “of the living Bread from heaven” and, in his Sermons, to “the Bread which came down from heaven and gives life to the world, namely the body of the Lord Jesus” (qtd. in Stone, History 301). Additionally, he is said to have performed several healings through offerings of consecrated bread—one on a fever-addled knight, another on a man seizing from a head wound (Morison 64). Bernard was particularly fearful about the anonymity of the newly arising Cathar heresy, which of course rejected the sacraments wholesale (Lambert 62). Indeed, France’s papal legate requested that Bernard preach in southern France, where the heresy was “making alarming progress” but where he was able, so the Lives of the Saints reports, to restore orthodoxy (“Saint Bernard”). To complicate the picture further, Bernard was a passionate devotee of the Virgin Mary.23 What is more fundamental, however, is why this devotion seized not only Bernard but his entire century. According to Miri Rubin, the answer has much to do with the Eucharist, as, from the eleventh century onward, greater interest in the reality of Christ’s presence in the Host engendered “ideas about Mary’s affinity” to the sacramental wafer (Corpus 142). In vernacular literature particularly, a strong bond “between the eucharistic body reborn at the mass and the original body born from a virgin womb” produced a powerful image that “linked both to crucifixion and to nativity in the Virgin Mary”; and because “the child was never without his mother, Mary herself was augmented in the eucharistic context … ” (142). Might this explain the ascendency of the Virgin Mary in the penultimate canto, which soon we shall explore? Or, perhaps, to phrase the question more

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precisely, could a Eucharistic reading of the Comedy explain her ascendency more forcibly—not to mention, Christ’s pivotal and extraordinary presence in Paradise xxxiii as the consecrated Host? If the child is never without his mother, after all, and if that bond between Christic bodies is forged through the presence of the Virgin, certainly this would make Mary’s presence in this canto—which otherwise appears far too much an upstaging of the incarnated Son for whom she served as vessel—more logistically appropriate. So, too, would it clarify Bernard of Clairvaux’s presence, as his intimate association with, and devotion to, the Virgin Mary otherwise overamplifies her status. But if the doctrine of Christ’s Incarnation—“that God became Man as Jesus in the Virgin’s womb”— is what is central to the entirety of the Comedy (Wilson 312), as many scholars argue; and if, even more germanely, Bernard metaphorically envisioned the Virgin Mary as the aqueduct that led from the Father to the Son (Botterill 113), should we not then anticipate Christ’s presence in Paradise in more narratively material terms? Surely Christ is not subordinate to the aqueduct through which he flows. In keeping with the mystery that is the Eucharist, however, at no point, “do we deal with Christ in His natural condition, in propria specie,” as early twentieth-century theologian Abbot Vonier averred in his Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist. “He must be there in specie aliena—in a condition different from His natural one—in order to safeguard the character of the sacrament as a sign” (21). In some sense, we might postulate that the Virgin Mary has also served throughout the Comedy as Dante’s aqueduct. As early as Inferno ii, Dante was told that it was “Mary who first took pity on [his] plight, calling Lucia to call upon Beatrice to help him out of the tangles of the dark wood”; and it will be “Mary to whom Bernard prays at the end, for Dante, and us, to be allowed to experience the supreme light” (Wilson 312). Indeed, acknowledging Christ’s Eucharistic presence at the end of the Comedy facilitates a beautiful binding—nay, absorption—of Mary (as the Mediatrix) with the three persons that are one God. Doing so also renders more explicable that moment in Canto xxxii, when Bernard instructs Dante: “Now look at that face [belonging to Mary] which resembles Christ the most, for only in its radiance will you be made ready to look at Christ” (xxxii.85–87, emphasis added). (Dante the Poet electrically animates Bernard’s counsel here by making the lines here treble—and exquisitely tremble with—Christ’s name: “ … venne/ … Cristo/ … ritenne/ … Cristo/ … chiarezza/ … Cristo.”) During the Middle Ages, sometimes the pyx in which reserved hosts were contained was considered to be “the Virgin bearing Christ” (Saxon, “Carolingian” 319); moreover, various theologians, such as Bridget of

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Vadstena (1302–1373), were wont to compare “the Communion vessel to the womb of the Virgin” (Cruz 35). Mary’s role as an intermediary to Christ is additionally confirmed by altar statues of Mary with Child, which depict her in priestly robes (Saxon, “Carolingian” 320). Bernard of Clairvaux clearly saw her this way: “O consecrated virgin, offer your son,” he writes, sanctioning the Virgin Mary as a chief offerer and intercessor, “the Father will fully accept this new sacrifice … ” (qtd. in Saxon, “Carolingian” 319–320). In fact, could this ultimately be why Bernard has been chosen by Dante to serve as the third guide who will accompany the Pilgrim to the very limits of Heaven? Yes, Dante in life may have been “a true follower” of Francis of Assisi, and yes, Francis may well have been the saint whom Dante held, “among all the saints, in a peculiar reference and affection” (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 342); and yes, Dante, like most Trecento Catholics, may have even considered Francis to be “something very close to another Christ” (Moloney 123). Even more curious for us is that, when it came to devotion to the humanity of Christ, Francis was the saint who “found in the Blessed Sacrament the Lord’s incarnation renewed” (123) and who devoted himself “to the reality of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist” (McGinn 46). So, of course we must ask as something of a necessary digression: Why isn’t Francis guiding the wayfarer to Heaven’s limits? Perhaps it is because Francis had been a monk in his lifetime and, therefore, was not permitted to serve in a priestly capacity. However devoted he may have been to the Eucharist, he was forever beholden to clergy who could administer the Host. In fact, that was why Francis refused to consider the sins of the clergy. “And I do it for this reason,” he declared in his dictated Testament, “because I see nothing corporeally of the Highest Son of God himself in this world, except his most Holy Body and most Holy Blood, which they [the clergy] receive and they alone minister to others” (qtd. in McGinn 46). Keep in mind that he said this only a decade after the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (which he is said to have attended), when that “first official document specifically linking ritual ordination with consecration occurred” (Macy, “Theology” 370). “[N]o one is able to confect the sacrament,” decreed the Council, “except priests who have been ritually ordained according to the keys of the Church which Jesus Christ himself entrusted to the apostles and their successors” (qtd. in Macy, “Theology” 370). And so, only priests could induce Christ’s true presence at the Mass (Macy, “Theology” 370). The political implications of such priestly dominion are likely obvious—and popes, as we have seen, were not averse to wielding their consecrative power. As for why a decree “that only a validly ordained priest ha[d] the power to confect the Eucharist” was deemed necessary at this historical juncture, it was in great part

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a response to heretical groups like the Cathars and Waldensians (O’Connor 186), the latter believing that only the good—and not merely good priests, at that—could celebrate the sacrament. If we are amenable to the proposition that the Virgin Mary appears in Paradise as a forerunner to Christ (or, at the least, that, where the Virgin appears, Christ is always present); and if, additionally, we accept that Bernard may be the contemplative chosen to shepherd Dante from Her to Him because of his ability to confect the sacrament, then the liminal nature of where we are is beautifully mirrored in the saints in the Mystic Rose. As Bernard describes of that white, floral hologram of Heaven’s blessed, “on the one side [of Christ], where the flower is in full bloom with all its petals, are seated those who believed in Christ yet to come”—the pre-Christian Elect, in other words—“on the other, where the half-circles are broken by vacant places, those who held their eyes on Christ already come” (xxxii.20–27, trans. Sinclair 463). In a sense, we are being asked, in our mind’s eye, to conceive simultaneously of Christ as yet to come and as already arrived. (Remember that this is the canto in which Bernard promises that, in looking upon Mary, Dante will have his eyes sufficiently purified “to look on Christ” (xxxii.87, trans. Ciardi 883).) Perhaps it is worth our revisiting—and reaffirming—the Virgin Mary’s relationship to the Eucharist, if for no other reason than to challenge those commentators who insist “that Mary’s triumph is given more attention in this canto than the triumph of Christ”; or that “Dante’s Christ here is impersonal”; or even that Dante’s “high Christology” in effect “obscures the Jesus of the gospels” (see Collins 270). On the contrary, that “tender, human Savior who is present in the pages of Bernard or in the mystical spirit of Francis and the Franciscan poets” (Collins 270) is indubitably reflected here but in his conceivably tenderest form—which is to say, in the form that encompasses both his sacrifice and his Body. If the Virgin Mary, as mother, “gives ‘matter’ to Christ,” as Astell observes (60), so too does Christ give back that matter in the form of Himself as everlasting Host. No wonder, then, that, while Dante’s “other contemporaries celebrated the bloody wounds of the stigmata or entered meditatively into Christ’s physical suffering, Dante presents us with Mary’s inviolate body—her womb, her breasts, her smile” (Hawkins, Dante 114). How more effectively to celebrate—and herald the vision of—Christ’s salvific Flesh than via she who gave Christ flesh on earth? Her relationship vis-à-vis the Eucharist has certainly not waned in recent centuries, as the nineteenth-century Peter Julian Eymard’s words demonstrate: “The Eucharist began at Bethlehem in Mary’s arms. It was she

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who brought to humanity the Bread for which it was famishing, and which alone can nourish it. She it was who took care of that Bread for us. It was she who nourished the Lamb whose life-giving Flesh we feed upon” (qtd. in realpresence). Or, we might turn to the twentieth-century John A. Hardon, who proclaims, “Had she not given Him His flesh and blood, there could not be a Eucharist” (“Eucharist”).24 In centuries past, we find “overt, dramatic references to Mary as tabernacle” (Van Ausdall 557), and in decades present, the Bishop Fulton J. Sheen referring to her as “a living Ciborium, a monstrance of the Divine Eucharist” (qtd. in realpresence). Such tropes may seem mere poetic waxing, but keep in mind that, in medieval times, sculpted figures of the Virgin Mary sometimes actually opened up to expose not only the possibility of a figure of the crucified Christ but also of Host wafers (Van Ausdall 557). As I mentioned earlier, Mary could even be found likened to an oven in which bread was baked. True, medieval embryology maintained, in the tradition of Galen, that all mothers were “an oven, or a vessel in which the foetus was cooked” (Rubin, Corpus 145); but the Virgin Mary’s role as oven for the Living Bread was a particularly powerful image. Certainly the following carol, by Franciscan John Reyman (c. 1492), underscores the image’s efficacy: “In virgyne Mary this brede was bake/Whenne criste of her manhoode did take,/For of alle synne mankynede to make,/Ete ye it so ye be [not dead]” (qtd. in Rubin, Corpus 145). In some sense, then, it is only appropriate that Canto xxxii’s vision of the Virgin—and third vision of her in Paradise—is that of her reigning now as “Empress” (xxxii.119). For, as Sinclair movingly declares, here Mary is the immediate preparation, by her likeness to Him, for the vision of Christ Himself, and in chief attendance on her is Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, the herald of human redemption. It is by this cumulative and heightened celebration of Mary, the chosen medium and unique embodiment, for Dante and his readers, of redeeming grace, that he prepares our minds for the final vision. (Dante’s Paradiso 476)

Sinclair further posits that there is “something curiously dreamlike in the way in which the first simile for the Empyrean of a great white rose seems to melt and disappear in the account of it” (Dante’s Paradiso 477). Perhaps that is because of the very nature of (what Thomas, in one of his Eucharistic hymns, acknowledges is) the Hidden God. For now, Dante has us fully enter a realm that is, to borrow from the Corpus Christi hymns, one of hidden signs and feeble senses failing; of the unseen Savior truly present underneath these veils.25

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The consummate canto Before commencing a Eucharistic reading of Paradise xxxiii, a brief summary of the canto is probably in order. Bernard asks, in the manner of a prayer, for the Virgin Mary’s intercession on Dante’s behalf. As Ciardi offers in his descriptive prelude to that canto, the prayer is answered, with Dante’s “soul swell[ing] with new power and grow[ing] calm in rapture” as the direct vision of God is revealed to him (889). How long the vision lasts, Dante cannot say; but he has looked into the Mystery and, once returned to himself, he is at a loss to describe truthfully the impressiveness of what he has seen. Nevertheless, its truth is “stamped upon his soul” (889). As for what this Mystery looked like: within “[i]ts depthless clarity of substance,” as Dante reports, I saw the Great Light shine into three circles in three clear colors bound in one same space; the first seemed to reflect the next like rainbow on rainbow, and the third was like a flame equally breathed forth by the other two. … O Light Eternal fixed in Self alone, known only to Yourself, and knowing Self, You love and glow, knowing and being known! That circling which, as I conceived it, shone in You as Your own first reflected light when I had looked deep into It a while, seemed in Itself and in Its own Self-color to be depicted with man’s very image. My eyes were totally absorbed in It. (Paradise xxxiii.116–132)

In trying to grapple with the elusiveness of “this new mystery,” Dante compares himself to “the geometer who tries so hard to square the circle, but cannot discover, think as he may, the principle involved” (xxxiii.133–136). His mind is fortunately struck by a “great flash of understanding”—though straightaway “power fail[s] high fantasy” and the granted comprehension is gone (xxxiii.142). Still, Dante is left with his will and desire “impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Paradise xxxiii.140–145). So often it is said that the Comedy’s final canto is a disappointment. The Pilgrim’s journey has been so long—and, perhaps, too successful at various way stations—that for the secular reader to reach the hundredth canto and be presented with a vision of the divine so abstractly drawn and so materially nonapparent spawns a certain disenchantment. Benedetto Croce, in 1921, called its poetic worth into question precisely on the grounds that, in Freccero’s summation, “Dante had surrendered poetic vision to abstract thought” (“Final” 16). Seung, more recently, bemoans that any readerly hope of encountering God, however pious Dante’s intentions, is thoroughly frustrated in Canto xxxiii, with “Dante’s

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beatific vision of the Holy Trinity giv[ing] us no more than three circles of three colors. His vision delivers so little that it is not enough to call it little—‘è tanto che non bast a dicer poco’ (Par. 33, 123)” (“Metaphysics” 217–218). Then again, for readers who come to the Comedy with a religious mindset, this last canto may strike them, as it does Collins, as being “of such incomparable beauty and spiritual depth that [it] must be contemplated and prayed rather than merely read and studied” (277). Indeed, if we are willing to keep in mind the cultural and historical import of the Eucharist during the Middle Ages, as well as the fact that, today, as then, this consecrated wafer is considered the theological and emotive epicenter of the Catholic Church, an entirely different experience may be found waiting. This is not the case only for the religiously anticipative reader, I would argue, but also the secular one. Moreover, if we keep in mind that during the Middle Ages, “a person’s importance was demonstrated according to how close one was to the first cause”—which, in liturgy, meant “physical proximity to the altar where God became present” (Foley 94)—we are perhaps better able to conjure the emotional, psychical and spiritual charge, and the holy and affecting eventfulness of journeying the entire way. The Church, after all, with its rood screens and its strict hierarchical protocols, intentionally distanced, non-clerical members from the altar, thus providing “a clear message about their lowly place in the church’s power structure” (Foley 94). But through Dante’s poem, the laity was given the means by which to approach what lay at, beyond, and above that altar, and to commune directly with the holiest of sacraments—with Christ who was there, consecrated as the Living Bread. First, however, it is worth our considering the more established reading that scholars have offered vis-à-vis Paradise xxxiii. Conventional wisdom holds that, through this vision of God’s essence, Dante sees what the sense of sight, the physical eyes, could not behold, the goal that reason could not approach, the truth that the intellect could not grasp: the mysteries of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the multiplicity of the material universe integrated into the unity of thought, and the reduction, to transcendent uncreated Being, of the ten categories which exhaust reality. (Mazzeo 3)

Much energy has also been worthily expended in explicating the importance of the circle to this canto, given that the circle is that “most perfectly simple and primitive symbol for totality, perfection, personal wholeness, or God” (Ralphs 55). In these “three circles of three colours, yet of one dimension,” Dante is witnessing, as Reynolds describes, “Three-in-One, Father, Son and Holy Ghost”

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(410). Equally important is what Ralphs expounds, which is that, in this “Trinity in unity,” “is the relationship between the Incarnate Christ seen as a human figure ineffably painted in the circle’s own colour, and the whole circle representing God the Son” (55–56). Still, Dante is incapable yet of understanding “how the imago Christi ‘conformed to the circle,’” as other scholars contend, “and consequently cannot find the language appropriate to the revelation … ” (Hart, “Geometric” 101–102); cannot understand “how the Incarnation ‘fits’ within the Blessed Trinity” (Hawkins, Dante 8). Only with that final flash of light does he understand “how the human and the divine are joined in the Incarnation” (Reynolds 410). Thus, ironically—and no doubt intentionally—Dante experiences a “vision of the ultimate mysteries of the Christian faith which Paul himself was reputed to have received: namely, a glimpse into the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity” (Schnapp, Transfiguration 111). Unavoidably, this brings to mind Dante’s declaration to Virgil in Inferno ii regarding his unsuitability to undertake the journey—because he is not Aeneas, because he is not Paul.26 As mentioned earlier, Paradise xxxiii opens with Bernard preparing Dante for the ultimate vision—a vision that Bernard has already openly declared includes Christ. The prayer to Mary, through which Bernard solicits her aid, begins with the pregnant exordium, “O Virgin Mother, daughter of your son, most humble, most exalted of all creatures chosen of God in His eternal plan … ” (xxxiii.1–3). This tercet’s opening line is no mere catachresis (Jacoff, “Transgression” 61), but a very intentional coalescence of contraries: Mary as virgin and mother, and as mother of a son who is also her father. This sets the stage for a canto rife with such coalescences: of things there but not; of time melding the past with the present and future. Consider, as one instance, the ravishingly delicate metaphor Dante uses to describe the inescapable fading of his vision: “imprints on the snow [that] fade in the sun” (xxxiii.64). As Hawkins effectively describes, “the ‘original’ departs without so much as a token of its reality or an intangible sweetness born in the heart” (Dante’s 227), for Dante is pointing poetically “to the evaporation or un-signing of language—the imperceptible dissolve into the ‘oltraggio’ [excess] of God’s ineffability” (227). These are unions, syntheses, and even evaporations that could not possibly have occurred in Inferno xxxiii, what with its “literalist perversion of the sacramental nature of communion” (Jacoff, “Transgression” 61–62). I want to extend that communion-related reading of Inferno and apply it equivalently to Paradise xxxiii’s “dematerializations” (as Hawkins calls them) (Dante 227), in order to demonstrate that these are not semantically gesturing toward the incarnational and Trinitarian exclusively, but also, quite vitally, toward the Eucharistic. What we are preparing for, in effect, is the consummation of

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the Mass itself, with its final and most sacred act: the witnessing of what was once bread now transubstantiated into Flesh; of what was once flesh—Christ Incarnate—now converted into the Bread of Angels. Recall that, in this same numerical location in Inferno, we heard Ugolino tell the story of his terrestrial imprisonment, complete with gory insinuations of his having ingested his own son—a son who, earlier, had offered up his emaciated body for his father’s consumption. Here, in Heaven, we now participate in that story’s sublimely sacred counterpart: redemption through the offered Bread, through the selfsacrificed Body—which, of course, can only be received because of Christ having come incarnationally through the Virgin Mother.27 Hence the emphasis in Bernard’s prayer on Mary’s service as the nurturing bed from which the “breadfruit” could emerge: “Within your womb rekindled was the love that gave the warmth that did allow this flower to come to bloom within this timeless peace. For all up here you are the noonday torch of charity, and down on earth, for men, the living spring of their eternal hope” (xxxiii.7–12). Decades later, the poet John Lydgate would, in his Procession of Corpus Christ, fuse bread, bloom, and birth even more overtly: Ecclesiaste, myrrour of sapience/With cloose castel beside a clowde reed,/That same token by virgynal bydence/Sette in Mary flouring of maydenhede,/Which bare the fruyt, the celestial bred,/Of our counfort and consolacyoun,/Into whose brest the Hoolly Gooste, tathe heede,/Sent to Nasareth gracyously came doune … (qtd. in Fisher 114)

Let us return to the opening invocation of Bernard’s prayer: “Oh Virgin Mother, daughter of your son … ” There, as earlier mentioned, we find, if not quite a perspicuous coalescence of contraries, certainly an implied one— or what Jacoff terms “the paradoxical spatial situation of the Virgin whose womb both contained Christ and is simultaneously contained by Him” (“Transgression” 61). Justifiably, she interprets this as Dante’s method of forcing his readers “to the limits of language in order to communicate [to them] that which is beyond the human” (61). Something similar is to be found in Pope Urban iv’s 1264 bull establishing the feast of Corpus Christi; that is, there, too, we see an artistic wrestling with language in order to communicate what, to its users, ultimately transcends language. When describing Christ’s bodily presence in the Eucharist, as a single example, the pope exclaims—drawing, perhaps unavoidably, on contraries: “Transcending every fullness of bounty, exceeding all manner of love, He provides himself in this meal. O singular and admirable, O unique and extraordinary gift, whereby the Giver becomes the gift, and the very same is given with the Giver inside” (qtd. in Pinyan). As

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a side note, one arguably finds a schematic representation for the Comedy in Urban IV’s Corpus Christi-promoting bull. For elsewhere in that bull, Urban IV mentions how “Men fell by means of the food of the death-giving tree” (something we surely see in the postlapsarian flesh-eating reflected in the deepest bowels of Inferno), before going on to describe how “man is raised up by means of the food of the life-giving tree” (reflected certainly in the Heavenly Pageant in Earthly Paradise). Ultimately, Urban IV exhorts that this latter food is “the food that fully restores, truly nourishes … not the flesh but the [soul] … .Mankind has eaten the bread of angels. Thus the Savior says, ‘My flesh is real food’” (qtd. in O’Connor, Hidden 194–195) (which, of course, we see in its salvific form in Paradise). But to return to the more pressing issue of language. The thematic threads woven into the Empyrean fabric of what follows in Dante’s Comedy—and which were recurrently stitched into all that has already passed—suggest it is not language, or at least not language alone, that is paramount, so much as the limits of human reason when it comes to that greatest of all divine mysteries. To try to understand transubstantiation, to try to imagine it, is indeed akin to a geometer trying to square the circle—at heart because it cannot be done. One cannot reason into existence something that can only exist by faith. Indeed, many medieval writers on the Eucharist stressed this precisely in their writings, even postulating that “the inability of human reason to make sense of the Eucharist [was] a fundamental part of the faith it inculcates” (Treherne, “Ekphrasis” 189). Gregory the Great, for one, wrote of the Eucharist as a model for the spirit’s submission before the miracle (189), and a liturgical commentary by Remigius of Auxerre (c. 841–908) asserted that the Eucharist, being a test of faith, was not to be understood by the mind (189). Hugh of Breteuil (d. 1101), meanwhile, “used the counter-intuitive nature of the Eucharist to argue that faith was required to understand the mystery of the Incarnation” (189, emphasis added). But we need not restrict ourselves to the Middle Ages. Abbot Vonier, writing in 1925, maintained that “His Presence in the sacrament must be truly such that at no time could it be seen otherwise than by the eye of faith” (21, emphasis added). But all this is precisely why we, the readers of Dante’s Comedy, must make sense of transubstantiation—or, rather, why it is worth our effectively disclosing its potential centrality to Dante’s poem. Although we have not yet parsed the mystically visionary nucleus of this final canto for its Eucharistic constituents, I do not doubt that some readers are still (understandably) wondering: but why would the Eucharist be in Paradise? The Host is decidedly terrestrial, after all—what humankind requires on earth, not in Heaven. Here, I can only repeat the words of Franco Ferruci:

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“The Comedy displays the eternal as a figure for the terrestrial world, and not vice-versa … The divine world, even at the moment when it is most highly celebrated, turns out to be a magnificent metaphor for human hope” (qtd. in Stone, Dante’s 68). Or, as Auerbach perhaps more pointedly verbalizes it, “[E]ven though the Comedy describes the state of souls after death, its subject, in the last analysis, remains earthly life with its entire range and content; everything that happens below the earth or in the heavens above relates to the human drama in this world” (132). Indeed, at one point in Paradise, Beatrice tells Dante that all that he sees is, in Watt’s words, merely “a representation constructed for [his] benefit so that he may comprehend” (148). Dante does not see Paradise as it actually is, in other words, just as the Eucharist would have represented for many of his contemporaries the Christ that they had not actually seen either.28 In that case, we should approach Dante’s vision of the Divine envisaging, desiring, anticipating even some presence of the Real Presence, of that risen Son who daily offers up his Body.

Spiritual seeing and the elevation of the Host But why would the alleged presence be executed here so obtusely? Wouldn’t any assertion of the integrality of the Eucharist to this canto—and to the Comedy as a whole—be more persuasive were the Host to appear more obviously, more graphically—a little less veiled? Not only would a more material presence of the Eucharist work against the grain of the gloriously “bearable lightness” of Dante’s encounter, it would also, once more, work against the very comprehension of what the Eucharist is. Here, I am speaking more literally than philosophically, given that, beginning in the thirteenth century, the solemn, awesome viewing of the Host “worked best” when the bread looked markedly unlike bread: when, “having something of the immaterial about it, … it presented no obstacle to the desire to contemplate a transcendent presence having nothing to do with the banal realities of daily life” (Cabié 76). Hosts were to be “round and whole and without blemish,” as a fourteenth-century bishop expounded; they were to be “like the lambe without a blemish who has not had a bone removed from it” (qtd. in Rubin, Corpus 39). “Only that which is of grain will be transubstantiated,” it was even contended—in this case, by the theologian and chronicler James of Vitry (c. 1160–1240) (qtd. in Rubin, Corpus 39). If flawlessness was next to godliness, so was insubstantiality. Hence the incentive to render the Eucharist as unearthly, un-quotidian, and otherworldly as possible. The absence of anything optically identifiable as

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Christ was believed to enhance the spiritual seeing that Augustine had, long ago, conceptually forwarded (Kessler 136). This type of seeing, as Augustine himself argued, was an intermediary between the corporeal and intellectual; between our “think[ing] of bodies previously known but now absent” (qtd. in Kessler 136). The Apostles, it was said, had been the first to struggle with this complex mode of seeing, as their having witnessed Christ alive had impeded their ability afterward to “truly know God. Only when Christ had been removed from their view could they see his divinity with the [Augustian] ‘eyes of their mind’” (Kessler 136). In other words, sacramentality did not arise from videtur (sense knowledge), argued Augustine, but from intelligitur (intellectual knowledge) (Mazza157). The reason things are called sacraments, to reprise, is precisely because “in them one thing is seen, another is to be understood” (qtd. in Vonier 22). While a sacrament had to be “celebrated in a visible way,” it nevertheless mandated being “understood as something invisible” (qtd. in Mazza 157). Drawing on Augustine, Thomas Aquinas similarly maintained that only through the “spiritual eye”—the intellect— could Christ be visible in the sacrament (qtd. in Vonier 22). Spiritual seeing was something heavily promoted as well by Bernard of Clairvaux. In fact, the extravagant enterprise that was the building of the first Gothic cathedral, St. Denis, was in part its patron Abbot Suger’s response to Bernard of Clairvaux’s assault on materiality: For Bernard, church decorations “somehow represent[ed] the ancient rite of the Jews,” acceptable only because “they stimulate the devotion of a carnal people with material ornaments because they cannot do so with spiritual ones.” In his view, such things serve only the senses; they delight but do not sustain viewers. (Kessler 144–145)

Additional artifacts in our possession confirm this medieval emphasis on the mind’s eye. These exist in the form of manuscript illuminations, for instance, such as three Romanesque sacramentaries that show the Lamb “enclosed in a roundel,” a design intended “to remind the viewer that Christ’s divine nature can only be viewed by the eye of the mind” (Saxon, “Carolingian” 273), as well as in the sumptuous yet edifying lyrics assembled in hymnals. The Eucharistic prayer Adoro te devote, conventionally attributed to Thomas, conspicuously articulates the invisible, intellectual nourishment the Eucharist provides: “Oh memento of the death of the Lord,/Living Bread that gives life to men./Concede that my mind may feed on you,/Always your sweetness to savour” (qtd. in Verdon, Art 71).

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And so, when in the thirty-third line of the thirty-third canto, Bernard makes his appeal to the Virgin to let the Pilgrim have “the Sum of Joy revealed before his eyes,” should we not but wonder whether the abstract nature of this imminent Joy is modeled on the spiritual seeing—is, in fact, enacting the sort of seeing that is paramount to the elevation of the Host during Mass? Several tercets later, Bernard gestures to Dante with a smile, requesting he “look up”—“but I already was [doing] instinctively what he would have me be,” Dante concedes: “for now my vision as it grew more clear was penetrating more and more the Ray of that exalted Light of Truth Itself. And from then on my vision rose to heights higher than words, which fail before such sight … ” (xxxiii.50–57). The significance of the Host’s elevation in Dante’s time cannot be overstated. While the first known mention of an elevation, in its modern sense, occurred in 1200, it was in the 1270s (when Dante was in his youth) that Pope Gregory x stipulated that it was to be part of the liturgical ceremony throughout the West (Cruz 275). The Bishop of Exeter, in his own decree of 1287, exhorted that “The host should be raised high enough so that it can be seen by all present. In this way the people’s devotion to the host will increase, as well as the quality of their faith” (qtd. in Cabié 77). No wonder that some historians consequently refer to the elevation’s institutionalization at this time as “epoch-making” (qtd. in Cruz 275). True, the act of holding up the communion wafer for congregants to see can be found mentioned in ancient liturgical writings; nevertheless, the elevation as immediately following the Consecration was adopted only during the Middle Ages, as a defense against those reputedly specious theologians who held the bread changed into the Body of Christ only after the consecrating words had been spoken over the wine as well. In order to visually discredit the latter, writes Cruz, “the consecrated Host was held up for the adoration of the people without waiting for the words of consecration to be spoken over the chalice” (275). Ironically, the viewing of the Host at elevation soon became adjudged the most vital part of the Mass—so much so that if attendees “had not seen the Blessed Sacrament some thought they had not properly heard Mass and therefore waited for another” (275). According to Carolyn Bynum, some devotees attended the liturgy purely “for the moment of elevation, racing from church to church to see as many consecrations as possible, and shouting at the priest to hold the host up higher” (qtd. in Van Ausdall 548). In the popular imagination, looking at the sacrament was thought to induce the same effects as actually taking communion (Cabié 79). “It was not rare, therefore,” as Robert Cabié notes, “for the faithful to leave church immediately after the elevation” (79)29—a claim Astell confirms when asserting that a “devout, gazing upon the

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consecrated Host at its elevation during Mass was often regarded as a substitute for the sacramental consumption of the Eucharist” (3). On the other hand, Astell warns that to address the question “Why?” is already to deconstruct the simple, aesthetic binary that separates looking from eating … . Understood in the context of medieval popular visual theory and piety, to see the Host was to touch it. One could eat it, touch it, taste it, with one’s eyes. Gazing upon the Host in adoration meant a real, physical contact with it, a touch, as light rays emanating from the Host beamed into the eye of the adorer; and vice versa, as rays from the beholder’s eye extended themselves in a line of vision to the Host. (3)

This, then, was the decisive “seeing with the eyes of faith,” as one was seeing the consecrated Host for “what it was—Christ” (3). The thirteenth-century hymn Adoro te devote, which edifyingly exalts the Godhead “hiding” in the Eucharist, relegates seeing, curiously enough, to a lower level than hearing: “Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:/How says trusty hearing? That shall be believed … ” (“Hymns”). Nevertheless, the visual was culturally paramount— perhaps to no one more than Christ’s uneducated, non-literate devotees. And so, eventually the esteem given to this ocular relationship led to the Church hiring a bevy of artists to visualize these concepts—in the form of altarpieces (both painted and sculpted), murals, stained-glass windows, and precious manuscript illuminations, each depicting “the moment of the elevation with the priest standing ad orientem” (Van Ausdall 542). Theological concepts all but unintelligible to the faithful masses were, by these artistic means, rendered more, if not ever completely, accessible (543). For this reason, I would urge that any poetic citation of the gesture of looking up—especially in the precipitate manner that Dante describes—would prompt immediate associations with the elevation. In no way is this to undo a reading like Cassell’s, which proposes that, when “St. Bernard signs for the wayfarer to look upward … [t]he wording echoes the opening of the Commedia as the Pilgrim’s gaze finally fixes on the real terminus, the center, of the universe, the real Sun, the sight of God himself ” (129). Rather, I am proposing, and am indeed paying tribute to—and in a quintessentially Dantesque fashion, at that—a complementary allegorical level of this episode’s meaning. If Dante’s Comedy is indeed a “Summa in verse,” should we not, ergo, expect for that “centerpiece of the liturgy” (Van Ausdall 542) to be present? Calling to mind the Summa Theologica in relation to the Comedy is not for the purposes of suggesting that Dante was obediently following in Thomas’ Scholastic footsteps. Instead, it

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is to render homage to the all-encompassing, sum-like nature of Dante’s epic poem.30 While Dante may have moved habitually within the orbit of scholastic thinking, he certainly “did not allow it to confine him when his own thought or poetic vision broke away from its limitations” (Wicksteed 136). When it came to Christian dogma, however, this Dante “accepted without question,” counsels Philip H. Wicksteed, no matter how “grievous a strain it put upon his conscience or his affections” (136). If the consecrated Host is “given the adoration that is reserved for God alone,” as Cruz avers, if it is “indeed, Almighty God Himself” (xiii, emphases added), Eucharistic presence, either as superimposed on or meshed with God’s Divine Light, would make spiritual, and even theological, sense. As for that light which Dante’s vision penetrates: it is, for him, “Eternal Light,” “Light Eternal,” “Light Supreme”—nay, it is “O somma luce che tanto ti levi/ da’ concetti mortali” (O Light Supreme that art so far exalted above mortal conceiving) (xxxiii.45, 24, 67–68, trans. Sinclair 481–483). While Dante never explicitly associates this Divine Light with the sun, scholars point frequently to his adoption elsewhere of that fiery star as a symbol of Christ or as a reflection “of God the Father and the Trinity” (Hardt 85). In his Convivio, in fact, Dante goes so far as to uphold that [n]o object of sense in all the universe is more worthy to be made the symbol of God than the sun, which enlightens, with the light of sense, itself first, and then all the celestial and elemental bodies … The sun quickens all things with his heat … and in like manner God quickens all things in goodness. (qtd. in Dunbar 41)

Within the Christian tradition, furthermore, the “idea of the Son as the Expression of the Father” was—and still is—often conceptualized as the sun relative to its rays, in part because the relationship between sun and beams pictorially elaborates “the paradox of a Trinity in a Unity which is indivisible” (Dunbar 144). In the fourth century, the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, had defended Trinitarianism in just these terms, in his case for the purposes of countering the Arian belief that Christ, the Son, was subordinate to the Father: The radiance [which is Christ] also is light, not second to the sun, nor a different light, nor from participation of it, but a whole and proper offspring of it. And such an offspring is necessarily one light; and no one would say they are two lights, but sun and radiance two, yet one the light from the sun enlightening in its radiance all things. So also the Godhead of the Son is the Father’s; whence

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also it is indivisible; and thus there is one God and none other but he. (qtd. in Dunbar 145, emphases added)

Soon after, Augustine would take up this identical thesis, asserting, “I shew you brightness coeval with its parent fire. For fire begets brightness, yet is it never without brightness. Since then you see that the brightness is coeval with its fire, suffer God to beget a Coeternal Son” (qtd. in Dunbar147). Is it any wonder, then, that in medieval times Hosts, too, were said miraculously to radiate light? The Cistercians and Beguines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries claimed repeatedly to have witnessed such visions (Snoek 59). While in centuries leading up to the twelfth, Eucharistic miracles typically portrayed the light surrounding the celebrant (323), in Dante’s time, the focus shifted to the Host, which now reportedly lit up “like a relic” (323). Nowhere is the relationship between the Eucharist, the Sun, and the Ray (which Dante overtly refers to as raggio) more conspicuous than in the art and architecture of the sunburst monstrance. True, this style of Eucharistic vessel emerged only after Dante’s lifetime; but as Foley reminds us, “No vessel [was] more symbolic of Eucharistic theology in the Middle Ages than the monstrance” and, like so much else during this historical period, its emergence was the byproduct of an “increased theological and devotional focus on the bread and the consequent desire of the people to see the host” (109). (Because the cup that held the Blood of Christ had by this time been largely withdrawn from communicants, it disappeared as an object of devotion (110).) With the rise of the Corpus Christi processions, perhaps needless to say, the monstrance would become central and indispensable, permitting “the faithful to gaze upon the Blessed Sacrament outside of Mass” (Groeschel and Monti 127). While the earliest surviving monstrance (1286) is a hexagonal tower— modeled, as many early ones were, on reliquaries that displayed holy relics (Groeschel and Monti 234–235)—the sunburst style, which emerged in the fourteenth century, would in time become the fashionable norm (Cruz xxi). Usually made of precious metal or gold, the vessel’s principal component was the circular glass through which the Eucharist could be seen, surrounded by “a metal sunburst of golden ‘rays’” (xxi). So popular was this design with its multiple rays that it purportedly led, during the Baroque period, to the demise of other styles, such as cross-shaped monstrances or ones supporting statuettes (100). In fact, sun monstrances remain by far the most prevalent in use (Thurston, “Ostensorium”). As a single example, the thirteenth-century’s

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bleeding Host of Santarem, Portugal, was eventually inserted, and can still be seen today, “in a gold and silver pear-shaped monstrance with a ‘sunburst’ of 33 rays” (Cruz 38–39)—the thirty-three rays, of course, symbolizing Christ’s terrestrial years. While Dante’s poetic vision of the Eternal Light precedes the rise of these sunburst monstrances, once more, the fact that the triune God was elaborated through the aid of sun symbolism as early as the third century, in the times of Athanasius (Dunbar 40), certainly warrants our mention of them. After all, it is feasible that the impetus for such monstrances was to make Christ qua Eucharistic more visibly present to his devotees. (Or, as Thomas Aquinas conceived with respect to the Host when enshrined in this manner—although here the language is admittedly Di Noia’s—“it is not that Christ becomes more present to us, but rather that we become more present to Him”.) Keeping in mind Albert’s avowal that “Eucharistia” implies “good grace” (Astell 55), it is worth our revisiting Dante’s exhortation at enduring “the living Ray”: “O grace abounding and allowing me to dare to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light, so deep my vision was consumed in It!” (xxxiii.77, 82–85, emphasis added). If contemplative experience is, as Di Noia argues (channeling Thomas), “a foretaste of the experience of heaven itself where we will be able to gaze upon Christ in all His glory,” can we not fairly safely extrapolate that Dante’s beatific experience in the Empyrean is reorienting that foretaste into a durational taste? It is this very access to taste that partly elucidates Dante’s triple reference to the “veil” deliberately camouflaging his poem’s allegorical meaning. In Inferno ix, Dante first warned his readers, prior to the opening of the gates to the city of Dis, “O all of you whose intellects are sound, look now and see the meaning that is hidden beneath the veil that covers my strange verses” (61–63). His second call for vigilance appeared in Purgatory viii: “Sharpen your Sight, Reader: the truth, this time, is covered by a thinner veil, and so, the meaning should be easy to perceive” (19–21). Last was the Pilgrim’s urging to Benedict in Paradise xxii that he be allowed to see the “unveiled image of [Benedict’s] face” sans its current shroud of bright light. To this, Benedict replied, “Brother, your high desire shall be fulfilled in the last sphere … for there, and only there, is every wish become a perfect, ripe, entire one, there where each part is always where it was” (61–66). Trinitarian in meaning, to be sure—but also Eucharistic. For, in medieval sacramental theology, which emphasized the invisible, “the outward appearance of Christ in the Eucharist was explained as a kind of veil for the truth of God’s real presence” (Van Ausdall 549). Notwithstanding the popular proliferation of sacramental images, theologians often advocated for a “veiling of the Eucharist”:

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“Echoing Christ’s words to Thomas after the resurrection,” as Kristen Van Ausdall informs us, “they argued that it was necessary to encourage faith without seeing the physical evidence” (548). Thus, we find Paschasius Radbertus declaring, in the ninth century, that the physical flesh of Christ is present in the Eucharist but that it is “veiled” by appearances of bread and wine in order that eating it not lead to revulsion (Mazza 184); and centuries later, Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) prayerfully panegyrizing that Christ’s wisdom is veiled—only now for reasons more self-reproachful than apprehensive apropos the consumption of human flesh: How could I, a poor sinner, who have so often offended You, dare to approach You, O Lord, if I behold You in all Your majesty? Under the appearance of bread, however, it is easy to approach You, for if a king disguises himself, it seems as if we do not have to talk to him with so much circumspection and ceremony. If You were not hidden, O Lord, who would dare to approach You with such coldness, so unworthily, and with so many imperfections? (qtd. in Cruz 204)

Indeed, in the devotional texts that span the interlude between these two individuals, Christ is “over and over again spoken of as hidden beneath the veils of bread and wine” (Fisher 110). One of the more prominent of these intervening speakers was, in fact, Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard argues, for instance, that the pillar of cloud in the wilderness, which appears in Exodus—and which God sends to lead the Children of Israel to the Promised Land—foretells the holy sacrament; for in both cases, God’s majesty, which is too unbearably splendid for mortal eyes, is ocularly veiled (Fisher 10). In an encomium directed to the Church, Bernard more directly exclaims, “Glorious and beloved bride, on earth thou hast the bridegroom in the sacrament, [while] in heaven without the veil” (qtd. in Fisher 111). Meanwhile, Thomas, in his sermon on Maundy Thursday, pays indirect tribute to this veiling when he exhorts, “O rich unleavened bread! O hiding place of the highest power!” (qtd. in Gaudoin-Parker 100–101); and in the Corpus Christi hymn Adoro te devote, he—if he is indeed its author—earnestly ends his Eucharistic devotion with: “Jesus whom I now see through a veil,/I pray that what I thirst for should happen./That, seeing your face revealed,/I may be blessed at the sight of your glory. Amen” (qtd. in Verdon, Art 71). Is this perchance what Dante sees at the end of his journey? Is he, in effect, being made privy to the “face” of that Hidden God—or, as Thomas writes in the hymn Sacris solemniis, to where God “dwell’st in cloudless light” (“Sacris”), otherwise “present underneath these veils” (“Adoro”)?

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As for the sweetness of the exalted Light of Truth that Dante endures—a sweetness he “still can feel distilling in [his] heart” (xxxiii.62–63)—that, too, shares descriptive similitude with the Eucharist. For, although the Middle Ages recognized eight tastes, sweetness alone “was associated with the Eucharist” (Rubin, “Popular” 459). Hence Bonaventure’s entreaty that Christ pierce his soul with love: “May my heart always hunger for you, so that soul may be filled with the sweetness of your presence.”

Accidents and substances Many readers, to recapitulate, fret that Dante’s encounter with the Eternal Light is overly abstract—and this in spite of Dante’s unequivocal intentions to align it with seeing. Scholars characteristically attribute what Dante sees, and how he sees (whether effective or not), to his ambition to accent the spiritual. Botterill, in fact, claims that all along Dante has been conceiving of the eyes as the vehicles that make experience apprehensible (111). Nevertheless, sight is “not merely the physical registration of phenomena” for Dante; it is the comprehension of that phenomena’s innate reality, and the object towards which he will “turn his gaze [at the end] is equally, if more profoundly, abstract, an ‘ultima salute’ that can clearly not be encompassed by the organs of material sense-perception alone” (111). When it comes to his articulating the depth of what he sees, perhaps one of the most theoretical allusions that Dante makes—arguably more lackluster than enlivening, more studied than sensuous—is to “substance” and “accident.” As Dante recounts while staring into the abounding grace: I saw how [the Eternal Light] contains within its depths all things bound in a single book by love of which creation is the scattered leaves: how substance, accident, and their relation were fused in such a way that what I now describe is but a glimmer of that Light. I know I saw the universal form, the fusion of all things, for I can feel, while speaking now, my heart leap up in joy. (Paradise xxxiii.85–93, emphases added)

Here, in an instant, as Musa glosses, “The conjoining of substance and accident in God and the union of the temporal and the eternal is what Dante saw” (583). When it comes to Dante’s importation of these Aristotelian concepts, albeit as filtered through the Scholastics, modern translators of Paradise tend to provide fairly succinct, if not overly fleeting, explications of them. Sinclair, for one, discloses that, while substances are “things existing in themselves,” accidents are

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“qualities and relations existing not in themselves but in substances” (Dante’s Paradise 486). Ciardi is somewhat less pedagogically motivated in providing, as his definition of substance—“Matter, all that exists in itself,” and of accident—“All that exists as a phase of matter” (895). Perhaps such exegetical brevity is meant to emulate the Aristotelian dryness with which Dante has inflected his Eternal Light? And yet, indispensible for us is not only what these terms came urgently to mean but how they were employed in relation to the subject and scholastic ratiocination of transubstantiation. Indeed, so vital were substance and accident to the medieval Eucharistic debate that they appear defined—and cogently defined, at that—in the glossary of terms germane to late medieval Eucharistic theology, which appears in the Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages (2012). Accident, we are informed, is a characteristic or property of a thing: [A]n accident requires the existence of another being for its own existence, as “this white” requires for its existence “this bread.” The nine Aristotelian accidents include: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, State, Action, Passion. Most basically, these would be the “sense data” of an object, that is, anything outwardly perceptible about a thing. (Levy et al. 619)

On the other hand, a substance is a being able to exist independently, not requiring the being of another for its own being. For instance, “this bread” does not require the existence of “this white” for it to be this bread; it could be another color and still be “this bread.” Substance pertains to the inner, essential reality of a thing as opposed to its outward, and often changeable, manifestation. Hence Substance is apprehended by the mind, rather than by the senses which apprehend accidents. (626)

As the glossary’s authors elaborate, this apprehension of substance via the mind rather than via the senses is imperative to comprehending how, while one’s senses would perceive the same thing post-transubstantiation, one’s mind would apprehend a substantial change. Hence Thomas’ ability to style a substantial change as “intellectual” or “spiritual” (qtd. in Levy et al., 626). In his scholastic explication on transubstantiation, in fact, Thomas categorically draws on the concepts of substance and accident. True, Alan of Lille (d. 1202) may have been the one to introduce the terms to the flourishing debates on the moment of the bread’s consecration (Irwin 250). But in theological circles, from that moment onward, as Irwin relates, the words “substance” and “accident” were to become key words in describing how Christ is really present in the Eucharist. Thus, by the time of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century one can say that the terms “substance” and “accident”

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were commonly being used (likely with a variety of interpretations) to describe the change from bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord. (250)

Thomas’ systematic elucidation of transubstantiation is the most procedurally thorough—painstakingly meticulous at times, in fact. While exhaustive and exhausting—and, yes, even fussy—it is also, in a manner, selflessly complete. His handling of the Real Presence includes, for instance, reassurances to his readers that Christ undergoes no injury in the priestly fracturing of the Host, nor in the Host’s ensuing ingestion—precisely because Christ’s substance alone, not his accidents, is present in the bread (Lahey 505). Theologians of Thomas’ day remained quite divided, however, concerning this new approach.31 In fact, in 1277, Thomas’ position was officially censured by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, with Thomas’ critics—including a fellow Dominican, the Archbishop of Canterbury—arguing in opposition to his proposed unicity of substantial form (517–518). Fortunately, the theological specifics of Thomas’ dense, challenging, and often hair-splitting works do not more powerfully nuance the argument being forwarded here. Nor do they detract from it. The same applies to the condemnations of Thomas’ position, given that the Church eventually gave his theological exposition of transubstantiation its imprimatur. By the time of Dante, Thomas’s approach to transubstantiation had already acquired prestige. In fact, only two years after Dante’s death, Thomas would officially be declared a saint. Again, the inference is not that Dante was a blanket Thomist; earlier critics have quite exploded that myth (Collins 97–98). Nevertheless, Dante did believe, much as Thomas believed, that, when it came to the sciences, all were handmaids to the queen of Theology, which stood alone—a “unique dove,” as Thomas put it (qtd. in Collins 99). More importantly for us, Thomas’ distinction between accidents and substance allowed him “to insist upon a spiritual, non-carnal, non-physical presence of Christ,” while also asserting to “the real presence of Christ in such a way that [believers could] speak, at least analogously, of his bodily presence, a bodily presence mediated by the species” (Kimel). Perhaps more enticing than Thomas’ scholastic handling of transubstantiation—and certainly more poetic—is the manner in which he accessibly and limpidly distilled taxingly abstruse ideas into the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi. The short, accessible verses of the hymn Lauda sion (“Laud, O Zion”), for example, are admirably nested with so much theology of a decidedly transubstantiative bent. For this reason, I quote them below at some length:

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… Hear what holy Church maintaineth,/That the bread its substance changeth/ Into flesh, the wine to blood./Doth it pass thy comprehending?/Faith, the law of sight transcending,/Leaps to things not understood./Here, beneath these signs are hidden/Priceless things, to sense forbidden;/Signs, not things, are all we see:/Flesh from bread, and blood from wine,/Yet is Christ in either sign/ All entire, confessed to be. / … /Nor a single doubt retain,/When they break the host in twain,/But that each part remain,/What was in the whole before./ Since the simple sign alone/Suffers change in state or form,/The signified remaining one/And the same for evermore./Lo! Upon the altar lies,/Hidden deep from human eyes,/Bread of angels from the skies … (qtd. in Groeschel and Monti 29–31)

Why is this so integral to Paradise xxxiii? The answer, I would advocate (as something of an inescapable reiteration), is because of a seminal Catholic belief in what is overwhelmingly present but cannot be seen. In effect, Dante’s vision is a visual confirmation of Thomas’ modification of those earlier statements on transubstantiation, which were startlingly materialist (Fisher 87). Dante affirms metaphysical presence: the spiritual rather than the quantitative, the intellectual in lieu of the imaginative (Moloney 143). In this way, Dante’s divine encounter—oft maligned for being disappointingly, if not deplorably, remote and academic—becomes a moving and theologically profound encounter with the Numinous, one whose substance is, at its heart, Christ himself. In this realm the senses can only fail, something Thomas himself concedes in the hymn Pange lingua (“Sing, My Tongue”): “Only be the heart in earnest,/faith her lesson quickly learns”—echoed not long after in “newer rites of grace prevail;/faith for all defects supplying,/where the feeble senses fail … ” (“Pange”). We might even turn to one of Thomas’ philosophical precursors, Peter Lombard (d. 1164), who also addresses what one witnesses after the consecration of the bread. As he asserts in Distinction—a text on which Thomas wrote a commentary—“one thing is seen, another is understood” (qtd. in Rogers 137, emphasis added). As for Dante’s repeated incapacity to find adequate words to describe what he sees, that may be no less a capitulation to poetic failure than a befittingly respectful acknowledgment of belief.

The love of loves But does this not potentially undo the Triune God, said to be at the heart of Dante’s direct vision? In order to address this worthy question, and before turning more precisely to what Dante beholds, I refer first to something written

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after Dante’s time—about Thomas Aquinas—and penned by John Lydgate for his Procession of Corpus Christi, no less. Lydgate describes a vision miraculously witnessed by “hoolly Thomas”—of persones three,/An ooste ful rounde, a sunne about it shyne,/Joyned in oon by parfyte vnytee,/A gloryous likenesse of Þe Trynitee,/Gracyous and digne for to beo comended,/With feytħ, witħ hope, witħ parfyte charitee,/Al oure byleeve is Þere Inne comprehended. (qtd. in Fisher 114)

Consider this in light of Dante’s descriptive reminiscence of his own vision: “Within Its depthless clarity of substance I saw the Great Light shine into three circles in three clear colors bound in one same space; the first seemed to reflect the next like a rainbow on rainbow, and the third was like a flame equally breathed forth by the other two” (xxxiii.115–120). Clarity, it may be worth noting, was one of the four qualities attributed during the High Middle Ages to Christ’s resurrected body—the others being subitilitas (the ability to walk through walls), agilitas (the ability to move quickly or lightly from place to place and to levitate), and impassibilitas (freedom from suffering) (Astell 4, 41). Could Dante’s syntactic allying of clarity with substance be his attempt to draw us toward connecting Christ’s resurrected body with that bread which, through transubstantiation, converts into Christ’s Body? This certainly appears plausible when we read his lines apropos Lydgate’s explicit association of the three persons with the “ooste ful rounde” and the sun shining around that Host in a glorious likeness of the Trinity. Such a reading is even further validated by the widespread symbolism since a much earlier time of “Christ as the ‘new sun’ of Christianity and as the ‘sun of justice’ … ” (Hardt 87). (This symbolism originates in part in the New Testament account of Christ’s crucifixion, when the sun was said to have darkened as he died (87).) Thus, we find in visions preceding Dante’s—such as those described by the eighthcentury Adamnan, the ninth-century Anskar, and the thirteenth-century chronicler-Monk of Eynsham—“a fiery mass of bright light,” which, for Anskar, was surrounded by a rainbow, and, for Adamnan, by three circles of color (Morgan, Dante 186). These characteristics were then repeated in the artwork of the late 1200s and early 1300s (186). In fact, the fresco in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel, completed in 1305 by Dante’s friend Giotto, “depicts Christ seated within a mandorla of indigo, white, and the orange-red of leaping flames”(186)—an image mirrored in Dante’s rainbow-girded vision of the Great Light, with its third circle “like a flame equally breathed forth by the other two” (xxxiii.120).

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To be sure, the ultimate mainspring for such descriptions may originate with Apocalypse 4.2–4.3, where we find a throne standing “in heaven, and one [sitting] there enthroned. He who sat there bore the semblance of a jewel, jasper or sardius, and there was a rainbow about the throne, like a vision of emerald” (qtd. in Morgan, Dante 186). That Christ is ascendant, however, in all these rainbow-girdled enthronements, makes space, I would venture, for the Eucharistic. If through his circles and rainbows, Dante is indeed “achiev[ing] what no physical circle or rainbow ever can”; if he is “revers[ing] all he knew about rainbows from Aristotle” and, in this way, “deliberately flout[ing] the possible” (Dronke 174), such is the manner by which one services faith rather than rationality. True, Hawkins notes that Dante’s Pilgrim, who was once adrift in a dark wood, now “struggles to rationalize mysteries that cannot be disentangled even by genius. The task cannot be done!” (Dante 69, emphasis added). But where precisely is this struggle manifest? Does it not seem more that our Pilgrim is not struggling at all? Rather, he appears quite willing, resigned—even content—to accept that the Light Supreme is “so far beyond the reach of mortal understanding” (xxxiii.67–68). When next he implores that Light Supreme to “relend now some small part of Your own Self, and give to my tongue the eloquence enough to capture just one spark of all Your glory” (xxxiii.69–71), he is asking, to be sure, for the poetic prowess to express what he witnessed. But is he not also conceivably soliciting via those allusive references to his tongue some small part of God—a touch, a resonant taste of the Body of Christ? If the Griffin, that two-fold beast in Earthly Paradise, was an incarnational sign that could only approximate “the union of two complete natures in a single person,” as Raffa argues (Divine 77), here we encounter the essence of Christ in a non-paradoxically co-existent form (non-paradoxical by transubstantiation standards, at least). This flesh qua Flesh is now part of three—three, of course, being “the harmonizing force that resolves those dualities” (Anderson 285). Perhaps we ought to recall, too, that the parchment on which any divine revelation was transcribed, whether literary or divine or both, was itself flesh, the skin of an animal (Kessler 187). So, when Dante describes what he sees contained in that Eternal Light as “bound by love in one volume, that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations … ” (xxxiii.86–88, trans. Sinclair 483), those leaves would have been flesh quite literally. And while comprising a whole in Heaven, these “leaves” are thoughtfully dispersed in discrete forms—not unlike the consecrated wafers, which, in spite of there being potentially millions of them on earth, with Christ

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wholly present in each, ultimately all are of that single In-Threed Volume. When evaluated through the perspectival lens of transubstantiation, then, “the knottiest doctrinal questions [that] come flooding” to Hawkins’ mind in this “11th hour” of Dante’s journey—namely, “How can God be three and one, or Christ be ‘light from light, true God of true God’ and at the same time the Word-made-flesh?” (Dante 69)—are to some extent mitigated. Thus far, I have been admittedly privileging Christ in the vision that Dante beholds; and Christ is reflected here as central to the depiction of the Trinity, I would argue—which is not to allege that he is somehow more than the Father and the Holy Spirit. Here, it might behoove us to consider what T.K. Seung refers to as the “marked contrast between the medieval and modern conception of God”: “Whereas the latter has been almost exclusively reduced to Christology, the former was always systematically amplified to Trinitarianism” (“Bonaventure’s” 141). For this reason, we find the Trinity narratively appearing in medieval places that would strike modern sensibilities as altogether odd. Take, as one example, an Anglo-Saxon sermon for Rogationtide (harvest-related days of prayer that take place prior to the Ascension). In this sermon, three loaves of bread that a neighbor is asked to contribute (Luke 6.5) are superimposed with a strikingly instructive “reference to the three persons of the Trinity, belief in whom is the food which brings man to eternal life” (Raw 39): The almighty Father is God, and his Son is almighty God, and the Holy Spirit is almighty God, not three gods, but they are all one almighty God, undivided. When you come to these three loaves, that is to the understanding of the holy Trinity, then you will have in that belief life and food for your soul, and might also feed another stranger … [E]veryone must desire faith in the holy Trinity, because that belief will bring him to eternal life. (qtd. in Raw 39)

So, while Christ may be central to a Christocentric conception of God, “in the Trinitarian conception,” as we can see by way of this story, Christ “cannot be taken to be any more of a center than the Father and the Spirit” (Seung, “Bonaventure’s” 141). Seung even argues that “as long as we fail to see the action of the Trinity as [the Comedy’s] main theme,” the poem is “bound to remain essentially a travelogue without an epic hero” (144). Some scholars, of course, speculate that Dante based his vision of these three intimately related circles on Joachim of Fiore’s (d. 1202) “figures,” which can be found in his famous Liber Figurarum—though his Trinity appears as three equally sized, interlinked circles (Collins 280) that are green, gold and red in color (or green, red, and blue in some manuscripts) (Havely 175). (At the least, this might

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explain why Dante gives Joachim, whose works were said to be sufficient to condemn as heretical any man found studying them (Astell 41), a place in the Heaven of the Sun (Leigh 201).) The fact that Dante does not overlap his circles but instead superimposes them renders them “more mysterious” to writers like Nick Havely (175). But that mystery, I would suggest, seems less mystery than Mystery, in the sense that the second circle, which is “painted with our likeness” (xxxiii.131, trans. Sinclair), is what is binding the first with the third—the Father with the Holy Spirit, through the Son. If so, it is an impulse not unlike Thomas’ when, in his Summa, he draws on John Damascene’s comparison of the sacrament to the burning coal witnessed by Isaiah in 6:6: “For a live ember is not simply wood, but wood united to fire; so also the bread of communion is not simple bread, but bread united with the Godhead” (qtd. in Herzman 187). In other words, that second circle is not inherently superior to, nor is it even an intermediary for, the other circles. Rather, as representative of Christ who took incarnational form in “nostra effige”—our likeness—that circle is what ultimately binds Earth with Heaven. “At last, the face of Christ!” Hawkins proclaims (Dante 113), well expressing the relief that the reader may experience at finally—finally!—seeing some vestige of the human Christ in Dante’s poem. Of course, what Dante offers us is but a brisk, fleeting image of the Incarnation, an image that (to borrow from the Poet himself) melts like an imprint in snow—absorbing itself back into itself, in a manner of speaking. Interestingly, Thomas made the fairly adamant doctrinal point that Christ could not appear in the Eucharist (Fitzpatrick 167)—and so one might understandably, on those grounds, refute any possibility of Eucharistic presence in Par. xxxiii. Popular attestations that Christ could appear in the Host, of course, abounded during the Middle Ages, such as in the early thirteenth-century Quest of the Holy Grail,32 and Clare of Assisi’s (d. 1253) dispelling of marauding soldiers via a consecrated wafer that spoke in a child’s voice (Cruz 249–250).33 As recent as 2001, in fact, a human face has been spotted in the Eucharist (see Rychlak). For Thomas, however, the Host, being the substance of Christ alone, could only be grasped by the intellect (Fitzpatrick 167). Might this explain why Dante describes this image of our likeness as being of the same coloration as the second circle itself (xxxiii.130)? No wonder, too, that it is not so much the face as “how the image was fitted to the circle and how it has its place there” (xxxiii.137–138, trans. Sinclair, emphasis added) that are the last words our Poet communicates regarding his Pilgrim’s vision. Christ’s face is not what is of utmost consequence so much as is, in Hawkins’ fine wording, “the face of the One who … made us in His divine

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image” (Dante 69)—or, as Collins postulates with parallel finesse, Christian faith in the Middle Ages “always understood the Incarnation and the Trinity in terms of each other,” and, as such, “the two mysteries [could not] be separated” (Dante 280). We might even borrow from Dante himself, who, earlier in Paradise, dispatched his own neologism for articulating in-threed-ness. To be sure, there are scholars who inadvertently counter this particular reading. According to Peter Dronke, it is the “sight of the human effigy and essence of the divine that, at the last, totally absorbs Dante’s contemplation” (176, emphasis added). Even more, Dronke propounds that, here, we come to see “fully the poetic reason why the plea to Mary had dominated the canto’s opening: it is she who makes this climax of Dante’s vision possible, because it is she who brought forth that ‘human form divine’ … ” (176).34 But I think it is fitting—more fitting, perhaps—to suggest not that Christ is central and superior in this Trinitarian circular image, but rather that, for humans, he needs to be. After all, it was by giving himself up, as Michael Gaudoin-Parker argues, that Christ demonstrated to his followers “in the most moving and concrete way his loving presence and desire to remain among [them] for all time” (xxvi). His willing descension—his sacrifice, in other words—was what they revered above all. Hence the echoing in the words “painted in our likeness” of the Comedy’s opening line, in which Dante described finding himself unaccountably midway upon the journey of nostra vita—our life (Inf. i.1). Christ had to die and Christ had to rise in order to come again; and here I mean “come again” not in the context of the end-times exclusively, but every day, every time someone on earth—one of us, in Dante’s thinking—partakes of the Eucharist. As Ronald B. Herzman sagely observes, The binding of heaven and earth at each consecration is a reminder that the Eucharist is the fulfillment of what was begun at the Incarnation—God’s gift of himself to man and the intersection of the worlds of eternity and time. As the phrase “binding heaven and earth” suggests, the sacramental gift of the Eucharist continues Christ’s saving presence in the world, giving to man the opportunity to live with his spirit fixed on the timeless whole of eternity. In this sense too is each Eucharistic banquet a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. (186)

This Eucharistic binding of heaven and earth is, by no mere chance, evocatively illustrated in a later fifteenth-century engraving of the Mass of St. Gregory, by Israel van Meckenem. Gregory, who is kneeling at the altar in the midst of saying Mass, looks astonished at what he sees—Christ as the Man of Sorrows miraculously rising out of the altar. While the image is identified by some scholars as a “late medieval affirmation of transubstantiation,” no Host appears in it, as David Morgan observes: “the empty plate for the host is only half visible beneath the cloth on which the

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chalice stands, suggesting that Jesus himself is the bread of the Eucharistic meal” (62–63). What better way to reflect that heavenly banquet than through its earthly embodiment? It is through the substantially-present Christ in the Eucharist—along with that mystical body bonded to Christ, the Church—that “the human individual is (or can be) at the point of union between God and Creation, temporal life and eternal life, sign and signified reality” (Little 31). Or, in more lay terms, we might say that it is in the sacrament that humans “meet Christ Himself ” (Wawrykow 67). Through approaching and receiving the Host in faith, the laity encounters “the same Christ who is present and seen by the angels in heaven” (73).35 Something is to be gleaned, as well, from Bonaventure’s etiological address in Exposition of the Mass concerning “why the priest in the Mass lifts on high the body of the Lord” (qtd. in Stone, History 338). One reason for elevating the Host, he stipulates, is so that communicants can obtain God the Father’s grace, which they have lost by their sins: When the priest lifts up Christ’s body, it is “as if to say: O heavenly Father, we have sinned, and we have provoked Thee to anger. But now look on the face of Christ Thy Son, whom we present to Thee, and we call Thee from anger and pity” (338). Another reason, Bonaventure proposes, is in order for “His bounty” to be shown: “For what bounty is greater than that man should eat the bread of angels” (338)? So, while John C. Barnes may rightfully maintain that Paradise invokes one’s being in a church much less so than Purgatory and that liturgy is similarly of less importance to Paradise’s construction (“Vestiges” 256), perhaps it is more, as earlier I suggested, that we have passed through the bones of the church to arrive at the altar—above the altar—where we are now participating in the sine qua non of that Church’s bones: Christ’s willing descent from the heavens at every Mass, in order to offer his body again to his living congregants. Imagine, thus, what Dante’s medieval audience might have felt upon reaching this last canto, especially given that never in Roman Catholic history had the sacrament been less frequently received than from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries (Macy, Theologies 119). After 1215’s Fourth Lateran Council especially, the Host was typically approached “only as a mark of the highest solemnity: upon coronation, or reception into knighthood, or the taking of religious vows” (119). The reluctance to draw near could not have been born of indifference, though, given that “the whole period under discussion witnessed a remarkable devotion to the Eucharist” (119). Perhaps the impetus, as Thomas granted, was the overpowering responsibility that came with the immolated Christ being present in the Eucharist: “The sacrament is called a victim (hostia) because it contains Christ Himself, who is the victim of salvation” (qtd. in Vonier 40).

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Such a disquieting level of responsibility credibly explains the concurrent rise during this period of (what we might call) Eucharistic analogs in narrative form. There is, for instance, that earliest surviving account of Purgatory’s founding, the Latin prose Tractatus du Purgatorio Sancti Patricii (c. 1180–1184), otherwise known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory, which we discussed in the last chapter. The T version of its knight’s purgatorial journey was frequently copied and widely translated for the next three centuries, no doubt accounting for its current renown as “one of the best-sellers of the Middle Ages” (Easting xvii). Earlier I broached its discussion of “food”—vague and generic enough as a description, certainly, not to summon the Eucharist immediately to mind. Nevertheless, in two of the three Middle English translations of the prose tract that we possess, more specific vignettes regarding food obtained at the gate of Heaven are to be found, ones that gesture more definitively toward the Eucharist. In Owayne Miles (OM1), not only are we told that God feeds heaven’s inhabitants nourishing food, but that each day he feeds them “ wiÞ his brede” (32, emphasis added). In an alternate manuscript, Owayne Miles (OM2), the source of that food is even more materially identified with Christ’s sacrifice: “Euery day cum[yth] owre fode/Fro hym Þat for vs bled hys blode;/ That xall Þou seyd hym soo,/Ther cam a gleme was wondyrly bryth,/T[h]at spredde ouer all Þe lond full ryth” (71, emphasis added). In yet another precursor to Dante’s vision, St. Paul’s Apocalypse, Paul, upon inquiring who gets cast into the Pit of Hell’s well, is informed that the unlucky culprit is “whoever does not confess that Christ has come in the flesh and that the Virgin Mary bore him and whoever says of the bread and the cup of blessing of the Eucharist that it is not the body and blood of Christ” (“St. Paul’s” 43). Even the fourteenth-century allegorical poem Pearl invites a Eucharistic reading (although it assuredly need not be confined to one). In this Middle English poem, a dreamer, who is mourning the loss of his pearl—a gem? his dead infant daughter? his soul?—is visited by a heavenly maiden, Pearl. Pearl disquisitions him on Christian doctrine, which he does not entirely understand. According to Judson Boyce Allen, this dreamer, at the poem’s end—not unlike Dante at his poem’s end—comes to it “in desire, but the dreamer, seeking to satisfy desire, goes further than Dante” (74). By this Allen means that Pearl’s narrative includes the dreamer’s departure from his vision and return to the terrestrial realm; and in this return, as Allen germanely reveals, “the dreamer is given the experience of Christ in the Mass, which ‘in [th]e forme of bred and wyn/[th]e preste vus schew3 uch a daye’ (1209–10)” (74).36 While the pearl may remain allegorically un-signified in this poem, other Christian writings, such as those of St. Cyprian, make countless, if incidental, references to the Eucharist—not only as “‘the holy

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thing,’ or ‘the holy thing of the Lord,’” but also as “the pearls of the Lord’” (Stone, History 40). With that in mind, it is probably worth our examining Pearl’s postdream denouement in greater detail: As I mourned my Pearl so flawless fine,/And to God committed her full and free,/With Christ’s dear blessing bestowing mine,/As in the form of bread and wine/Is shown us daily in sacrament;/O may we serve him well, and shine/As precious pearls to his content./Amen. (31)

Allen, as aforementioned, is one of the few scholars to have identified sacramental resonances apropos the latter part of Paradise. True, these he associates with the canticle’s dominant imagery in the vicinity of Mars, which “if drawn in a single vertical set,” he recommends, “compose[s] an image of a chalice” (74). While his segue from chalice to Eucharist may be corroboratively tentative at best, he does observe that “[w]e may see the chalice if the Eucharist is an appropriate conclusion for such a poem as Dante’s, and if Dante’s doctrine of images is one with the Eucharist is, in medieval terms, ‘convenient’” (74). In a more minor, but still meritorious, key, Magnus Ullén figuratively invokes transubstantiation in order to vivify the workings of Dante’s final canto—especially the moment when Dante discerns that “God is a circle ‘with our image within itself ’” (177). For, the “translucence with which this final scene of the Comedy is marked,” as Ullén advances, “allows us to look upon Divina Commedia as a transubstantiation, as it were, of allegory into symbol and vice versa” (177). And so we come to the end of Dante’s poem—and to that “great flash of understanding” which strikes the Pilgrim’s mind, permitting him temporary access to the mystery of “how our image fit into that circle,” how it could “conform” (xxxiii.136–138). No sooner is understanding apprehended than it vanishes; “but, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,” Dante rapturously feels his will and desire impelled by that “Love that moves the sun and the other stars” (xxxiii.143–145). In the end, Dante is at one with God’s love—which, in its perfectly balanced and wheel-like turning is everything Inferno’s personified Wheel of Fortune was not. That the last word of this canticle—stelle (stars)—is the same that brings both Inferno and Purgatory to their close is perhaps foreseeable, given that the Pilgrim’s beloved first guide, Virgil, had concluded three of his own poems with the (admittedly, very differently weighted) word umbrae (shadows) (Dronke 179). In this way, Dante invests his triptych poem with a “luminous optimism, such as his guide had not known” (178–179). Or, to borrow from Regina Mara Schwartz, we might say that, unlike his pagan precursor, Dante breaks “through the tragedy of fallen signification”—although Schwartz does not

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make this claim regarding Dante. Rather, Schwartz is speaking of those “words of institution, hoc est corpus meum” (9). For “This is My Body,” so she argues, are the words capable of restoring justice, of making our dead flesh live, and of assuring our participation in divine love; the Eucharist, she continues, is what brings “salvation into a fallen world, restoring paradisal harmony” (9). Is there not perhaps an echo of this in Dante’s “high fantasy” (xxxiii.142)? For some, the great flash that spawns Dante’s evanescent understanding— and, even more importantly perhaps, his will and desire enduringly propelled by Love—may bring to mind Augustine’s famous conversion, during which, as he outlines in his Confessions, he grasped the light of Love’s truth (GaudoinParker xxv). “I heard your voice calling from high,” expresses Augustine to God, “saying, ‘I am the food of full-grown men. Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead, you shall be changed into me’” (qtd. in GaudoinParker xxv, emphasis added). This Food, in other words, offers immersion of the self into Love—or, as Gaudoin-Parker aptly phrases it, “The stark simplicity of the eucharistic mystery converts [communicants] from being consumers into being consumed by Love” (xxv); from being eaters of flesh (like those in the Inferno), to being lovingly absorbed into the Flesh. It makes sense at this juncture to recall what Bernard of Clairvaux—the very same who literarily brought about Dante’s sublime vision—wrote of the Eucharist: “Jesus, what made You so small? LOVE!”. True, the all-caps of the word love may not have appeared in Bernard’s original text; but the sentiment is certainly indicative of the intense connection for the medieval believer between God’s Love, Christ’s sacrifice, and the transubstantiated presence of that sacrifice in the Host. If not, what then are we to make of Bernard designating this particular sacrament “The Love of loves”—or of the later assertion, by Thomas Aquinas, that the Eucharist is “a Sacrament of love and a token of the greatest love that a God could give us” (Cruz 204)? At the end of Dante’s Comedy, not only do we find ourselves having traveled through a threefold hereafter; given Dante’s explicit devotion to in-threed-ness, it is a hereafter that plausibly signifies the threefold signification of the Eucharist. Who better to trust on that matter than Thomas Aquinas? As he delineates in the Summa, one of this sacrament’s significations is with regard to the past insofar as it is commemorative of the Lord’s passion, which was a true sacrifice, and according to this it is called a sacrifice; it has a second signification with regard to the present, namely ecclesiastical unity,

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into which men are incorporated through the sacrament, and according to that aspect it is called communion … It has a third signification with regard to the future, inasmuch as the sacrament is a figure of the divine fruition which will take place in heaven, and according to this aspect it is called viaticum, because it gives us here on earth the means of getting there. (qtd. in Vonier 41, emphases added)

The past and the present as here on earth: such temporal identity is crucial to the Comedy. For Dante will—indeed must—return from the altar of God to his terrestrial home (even if it is not his Florentine residence). And why? Because he must proffer his envisioned Christian readers his message of Eucharistic joy— not to mention, his poem which expresses that joy as felicitously fitted as a “ring exactly [to] the finger” (Para. xxxii.57, trans. Sinclair 465).

Notes 1 Even earlier, Augustine attacked those who attempted to understand the Trinity on the basis of reason: “my pen is on the watch against the sophistries of those who scorn the starting-point of faith, and allow themselves to be deceived through an unseasonable and misguided love of reason” (qtd. in Raw 17). 2 He insists they do not, either in Hell or Purgatory. His lack of equivocation is based on Thomas Aquinas: “The Sacraments do not remain in the afterlife” (qtd. in Armour, Door 8). Armour does accede, however, to a “brief sacramental reference” in Dante’s employment of the “bread of angels,” although he stipulates that the phrase is “absorbed into, and superseded by, a much more extended and elevated scheme of thought and imagery” (Door 4). 3 The words appear in Latin: Ego sum panis vivus quite de cello descendi. 4 Although Christ’s body is substantially present through conversion, the rest of him—“his soul, divinity and accidents—[are] present by concomitance” (Burr 99). 5 Royal reads this as more “literally” reflecting the four cardinal and three theological virtues (182). 6 Justinian says this when acknowledging how his initial belief in Christ (as having been divine only, and not also mortal) was corrected. 7 Dante’s inquiry regarding the moon-spots is much remarked on by commentators. As Dunbar notes in his own commentary, “lacking though it may be for the modern reader both in significance and in romance,” the broaching of that topic does allow Beatrice to point to the insufficiencies of reason (38). The significance of the darkened moon to the visions of Juliana of Cornillon—which are what led

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to the founding of that feast—probably warrants mention, however slim I find the links between those visions and Dante’s inquiry. Nevertheless, for the sake of thoroughness:

while at prayer [Juliana] saw the full moon, the disk of which was darkened in one area. Two more years would pass before she received an interior message explaining the vision—“The moon, which is appearing to you, is a figure of My Church. The dark line passing over it, and veiling some of its brightness, is to signify that a great feast in honour of the Blessed Sacrament is wanting to complete its glory.” (Groeschel and Monti 225) 8 Ciardi differently proposes that these may stand for Justinian’s “double glory as Emperor and Lawgiver,” as it was Justinian who codified Roman law (653, 643). 9 I borrow this from Musa’s reference in Par. xiii.57, to “the Love which tri-unites with them … ” (468). 10 Musa refers to these as “in you” and “in me” (443). 11 I am mystified still as to why Dante places Siger of Brabant (1226?–1284?) in this realm. Dante’s reasons—at least as he offers them in his Comedy—are as follows: “[T]his is the endless radiance of Siger, who lectured on the Street of Straw, exposing invidiously logical beliefs” (x.136–138). Nevertheless, Siger “doubt[ed] in the immortality of the soul [which] involved him in a lengthy dispute with his colleague Thomas Aquinas and eventually led to charges of heresy” (Musa 452). 12 It had become a custom in the two orders’ churches that on St. Francis’s Day the preacher should be a Dominican and on St. Dominic’s Day, a Franciscan (Sinclair, Dante’s Paradiso 172). 13 As Sinclair notes: “The idea of progressive encounters with the Holy Trinity is not original with Dante. Probably he got it from Bernard of Clairvaux’s reflections on St. Benedict’s Holy Rule for monks” (Dante’s Paradiso 197). 14 Daniel Murtaugh likens it to the crusaders’ cross (280). 15 In fairness to Sinclair, he asserts that this is the sole “explicit reference to the Eucharist in the Divine Comedy,” although he sees deliberate correspondences in Purgatory between the Host and the pageant (Dante’s Purgatorio 415). He even admits that the absence of the Eucharist elsewhere in the poem is “surprising” (415). Obviously, I disagree on this absence. 16 And yet, the Pilgrim is understandably perplexed upon discovering, in Canto xx, that Jupiter’s sphere includes the souls of pagans like the Roman emperor Trajan and Ripheus, a Trojan who appears in Virgil’s Aeneid. The Eagle’s response? That mortals ought to keep themselves “restrained in judging, for we, who see God, do not yet know all the elect; … [but] that which God wills we will too” (xx.134–138, trans. Sinclair).

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17 Granted, there may also be shades here of the money-pouch as a “metaphor for trained memory [which was] used extensively by Hugh of St. Victor and other twelfth-century writers” (Carruthers 39). 18 In a somewhat related vein, “Jesus as a mother bird can also be found in the gospels (cf. Luke 13:34)” (Collins 272). 19 Consecrated wafers that are not used in the Mass are “reserved,” or stored in a tabernacle, for future use. 20 More completely, as relayed in Mark, Christ’s

garments became glistering, exceeding white, so as no fuller on earth can whiten them. And there appeared unto them Elijah with Moses: and they were talking with Jesus. And Peter answereth and saith to Jesus, Rabbi, it is good for us to be here: and let us make three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elijah. For he knew not what to answer; for they became sore afraid. And there came a cloud overshadowing them: and there came a voice out of the cloud, This is my beloved Son: hear ye him (9:3–7). 21 Bernard’s commanding preaching ability was put to great institutional use. In 1146, he purportedly roused volunteers singlehandedly—both regal and rustic ones—who, until then, had been quite impassive about joining the Second Crusade to Jerusalem. (See Odo of Deuil’s twelfth-century chronicle The Crusade of Louis VII.) 22 His eloquence won him the title of Doctor Mellifluus, or Honey-Sweet Doctor (“Saint Bernard”). Though I do find it a theoretical stretch, I should mention that the identification of the Virgin Mary with Christ as the Eucharist was sometimes expressed in an image of honey: “the eucharist smelt like honey to those blessed by eucharistic visions, and in it Christ was miraculous honey produced, according to Bonaventure, by ‘our bee the Virgin Mary’” (Rubin, Corpus 143). 23 It has even been suggested that Courtly Love was a secular adaptation of Bernard’s devotion to the Virgin (James 177). 24 Hardon’s writings on the Eucharist can be found archived online at www.therealpresence.org. 25 These lines are directly from—or are some variation on (purely for grammatical purposes)—the hymns Lauda sion Pange lingua and Adoro te Devote respectively. 26 Freccero argues the image Dante leaves us with is not a circle but a wheel. This, he grants, is an oversight easy to comprehend: “We are so accustomed to the symbol of the circle in the mystical tradition and in the works of Dante himself that we read it here, into the word rota” (“Final” 16). 27 This proposed inverted correspondence between Mary and Ugolino intriguingly problematizes Price’s contention that cannibalism, which suggests a “prelinguistic lawlessness,” returns humans to “being literally infants. [Cannibalism] is the

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28 29

30

31 32

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domain of the mother, and it is not surprising, then, to note the associations between cannibalism and the relationship of mother and child that manifest themselves” through episodes of consumption (22). Here, I borrow Watt’s claim that Dante uses a church as “a facsimile of the Holy City [his readers] have not actually seen” (148). This may well have led to the cult of the Blessed Sacrament, whereby some people thought a Christian life “could be extended in proportion to the time spent looking at the body of Christ” (Cabié 79). As a result, a prolonged length of elevation was requested, leading to the Host often being “placed in a reliquary in a niche located above the altar throughout the whole Mass” (79). And if a consecrated Host was able to be concealed in, say, a statue of the crucified Christ, “the impact on those viewing the crucified savior during Mass was even greater” (Saxon, “Carolingian” 274). I am more inclined toward Philip Wicksteed’s belief that we “better understand Dante, and shall better use Aquinas as an aid to studying him, if we think of him as moving in the circle of ideas which Aquinas presents to us in its systematic completeness” (136). Needless to say, perhaps, Thomas’ application of the concepts was also “very far from anything which Aristotle ever dreamt of ” (Moloney 144). This anonymous work ends with Galahad’s discovery of the Grail, after which there is a Communion:

Next Josephus acted as though he were entering on the Consecration of the Mass. After pausing a moment quietly, he took from the Vessel a Host made in the likeness of bread. As he raised it aloft, there descended from above a figure like to a child, whose countenance glowed and blazed as being on fire; and he entered into the bread, which quite distinctly took on human form before the eyes of those assembled there … (qtd. in O’Connor 189). 33 Meanwhile, one of her fellow sisters, Francesca, was reported to have seen, in Cruz’s words, “a beautiful child in the Host which was being brought to Clare; on another occasion she saw that same child resting on Clare’s heart and covering her with luminous wings” (250). 34 Sinclair believes that “the immediate and operative Divine Grace for [medieval] men” came not through Christ but through the Virgin Mary (Dante’s Paradiso 487–488). The reason for this, he argues, is that the Church had for so many generations been “bound by the absolute requirements of a ruthless dialectic concerned with the divine unity in the trinity that it could find its liberation and assurance only in the ‘Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son’” (488). Obviously, I disagree quite ardently with the “lost-Christ” hermeneutic—at least vis-à-vis Dante’s poem.

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35 This connection between the heavenly Christ, who suffered and ascended to heaven, and the Eucharistic Christ was made by John Chrysostom (d. 497) (Wawrykow 73). 36 Allen asserts that this experience would have been “Dante’s once he left the poem, in the continuing Eucharistic celebration of the Church … ” (74).

6

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Dante Alighieri did something theologically and politically remarkable via his Comedy: he figuratively liberated access to the Eucharist. When one reads a scholarly claim about the early thirteenth century—such as the one about to follow by Bernard McGinn—one cannot help but marvel at the role Dante later was to play. After all, it was during that period that “the first stirrings of the process of democratization and secularization that was to grow over the next five centuries” took place, such that, for the first time, “it was practically and not just theoretically possible for all Christians, not just the religiosi, to enjoy immediate consciousness of God’s presence” (13). While always at the heart of Christian worship, the Eucharistic Action, of course, never played a part in the New Testament. True, one encounters the Lord’s Supper, John’s potent revelation of Christ as the Bread from Heaven, and even Paul’s reiteration in his epistles that the breaking of bread is seminally connected to Christ. But the Eucharist’s elucidation as both act and substance occurred, as we have seen, sometime later and over hundreds of years. In that sense, we might well concur with Dante that his poem is sacred—and not in any artistically ego-bound or heretical sense. Rather, the Comedy operates as a theologically sound continuation of Scripture, attentively and lovingly incorporating—indeed, axially folding—the Real Presence into the medieval Christian cosmology. While pointing back, in anticipated fashion, to the Old Testament’s emphasis on the forbidden fruit—on Adam and his apple—as well as to the New Testament’s emphasis on the Incarnation (Little 87), Dante additionally points us forward—to the transubstantiated Fruit that is Christ’s bodily sacrifice qua “everlasting covenant.” According to Stephen Michael Little, Adam and Christ are especially paralleled in the Comedy “in terms of their most important acts: for Adam, eating; for Christ, permitting himself to be eaten. By calling Adam pomo [fruit]”—which Dante does in Paradise xxvi—“Dante also compares Adam to something intended to be eaten, again like Christ in the Eucharist” (87). But this is not merely allusion or comparison, I would urge.

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In other words, unlike Little, I firmly believe Dante makes the Eucharist the pinnacle of his Comedy—and not only because that sacrament is the apogee of the expression solum fidem (solely by faith) or because he wishes to highlight Christ’s sacrifice. Rather, Dante is offering his readers theologically recursive possibility; for, here is reflected the salvific food of Christ—and, thus, every present and future Christian’s redemption from The Fall. Consequently, I am in complete accord with Bruno Nardi who argued that Dante did not consider his poem “literary artifice” but a “true prophetic vision” and that to reject Dante’s divinatory point of view is to misunderstand Dante (qtd. in Moevs 178). So, while Harold Bloom may consider the Comedy “a purely personal gnosis” and “wholly personal poem” (qtd. in Hawkins, Dante 89)— and certainly he has the right to—as Hawkins observes, to view it in this fashion is “to ignore much of the poem’s enterprise and neglect the very premises of the poet’s great daring. For Dante presents himself as someone with an assigned part to play, a tradition to pass on, a hope that transcends his own ambition” (Dante 90).1 Reading the Comedy through a Eucharistic lens certainly helps us comprehend why Dante may have held such meta-personal convictions.2 Of course Dante never conceived, as Auerbach elegantly counsels, that “his work would one day be admired, in large part, by people to whom the foundations of his faith and world view had become meaningless and alien” (Dante 158). This is not to argue against its being explored in alternative ways, however. As Stone worthily argues, “While Dante’s contemporaries may have tended to understand the Comedy as a poem aiming to teach the truths of Christianity,” there is nothing inappropriate in “our using the poem in other ways—including ways that Dante could not have imagined” (Dante’s 6). Also indisputably true, as I articulated at the outset, is that the poem’s rich hoard of themes seems almost infinitely to invite multiple interpretations. I myself have, admittedly, skipped many parts of the poem that valuably negotiate other sorts—incalculable sorts—of ground: political, military, exilic, romantic, scientific, and more. And so the paradox of Cecil Grayson being able to avow that readers will “continue to find deeper layers of truth” in the Comedy, as the poem has “the quality of inexhaustible fount of wisdom and inspiration” (162) at the same time that Étienne Gilson can lament that the innumerable hermeneutic modes and the fact that no two initiates possess “the same key” often succeed only at producing hermetic discussions that obscure the poem’s meaning (290). Still, one can fairly effortlessly interpret the entire poem philosophically—“all the way to the end of Paradiso” (Foster 58),3 if one chooses—just as one can, in too thoroughly Christianizing its every facet, “contribute to narrowing the scope of its appeal”

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(Stone, Dante’s 2). Our modern, globalized era tends—defensibly, mind you— to honor Dante’s poem by demonstrating “how it may speak to audiences of different faiths (or to those of no faith)” (2). On the other hand, we need make equal space for Auerbach’s worthy meditation on whether or not “a modern reader, even if he is supremely learned and endowed with the highest degree of historical empathy, [can] penetrate to Dante if he is utterly unwilling to accept Dante’s mode of thought” (Dante 158). Recognizing the poem’s Christian core, besides, is hardly to dishonor the poem or to “Christianize” its every aspect. At this point, I feel the need to self-disclose: I am not a practicing Roman Catholic (though I did grow up in that tradition). Nevertheless, I am able to recognize—and, indeed, have found myself more gratified and stirred by Dante’s Comedy because of—its Eucharistic “imprint[s] in the snow.” Is it possible, one last time, that I am seeing what isn’t there? Yes, I suppose. But it might be profitable here to call upon André Frossard, who recounts his experience of entering a chapel (prior to his conversion to Catholicism): “In the interest of art, I had previously visited churches but I had never before seen a host, much less a monstrance with a host in it. I was therefore quite unaware that before me was the Blessed Sacrament below which many candles were burning”—at which point he concedes, “I didn’t see the point of all this, naturally, since I was not looking for it.” (qtd. in Groeschel and Monti, emphasis added) In other words, when it comes to the Eucharist, as Groeschel and Monti articulate more academically, “ecumenically minded writers are going to have their difficulties and will often have a bias against this devotion that is generally not shared by non-Catholic Christians” (60)—not to mention, by non-Christians. Certainly, the Protestant Reformation did not help facilitate a Catholic hermeneutic apropos Dante’s Comedy. Early protestors envisioned—and painted—the Catholic Mass as all-out heathenish, comparable, in the words of Schwartz, to an “ancient pagan idolatry of wood and stone” (29). And the worst of those idols? According to Scottish reformer John Knox (d. 1572), “the most miserable of all” was “the poor God of bread.” (qtd. in Schwartz, emphasis added). That bread went by other reviled names as well, such as “cake idol” and “idol of the altar” (qtd. in Schwartz 29). Even while clinging to revised forms of a Eucharist, in giving up transubstantiation, Knox and the like lost a doctrine that—for Catholics, at least—infuses “all materiality, spirituality, and signification with the presence of God” (Schwartz 12). Why earlier commentators who were Catholic did not apprehend a Eucharistic presence across the span of the Comedy, I cannot say. The Eucharistic overtones appear too systemically a part of the poem not to be considered,

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at least, as a potential filament thematically linking Inferno (the exclusively corporeal realm), via Purgatory (the incarnational realm), to Heaven (the realm of transubstantiation).4 In the sovereign state of Hell, to summarize, eating— which includes the consumption of human flesh—is exclusively a biological action, with Dante himself referring to the act as “bestiale segno” (Freccero, “Bestial” 63). As John Freccero points out, the opposite of that Dantean phrase would be “divine food,” the “pan degli angeli” of Paradise (63). Indeed, Freccero goes so far as to say that the seemingly simple “oxymoronic phrase [‘bestiale segno’] invented by Dante to describe the lower degradation of the highest powers turns out to be the logical opposite of the central mystery of Christianity: not bestial, but angelic; not simply a sign, but a presence” (63). Freccero does not carry this reading more comprehensively across Dante’s poem—and, once again, one could argue I have erred in doing so myself; that I have in fact erroneously imposed presence onto the material. This I leave to my readers to decide. But, to reiterate one last time, the fact that the Eucharist was, and still is, the focal point of the Catholic faith recommends something else—as does the fact that Dante, being the mathematical5 and Triune-conscious master craftsman that he was, would probably not have flouted this central dogma. The Host as the actual flesh of Christ was simply too powerful, as Miri Rubin recommends, “as awesome as it was promising” in its combining—and, so, in Dante’s needing judiciously to distinguish—“the most holy [from] the most aberrant/abhorrent” (Corpus 360). Indeed, the Host’s perceived awesomeness can be readily gleaned from Thomas Aquinas’s attendance to the holy salves and grace that it brings: The Sacrament of the Body of the Lord puts the demons to flight, defends us against the incentives to vice and concupiscence, cleanses the soul from sin, quiets the anger of God, enlightens the understanding to know God, inflames the will and the affections with the love of God, fills the memory with spiritual sweetness, confirms the entire man in good, frees us from eternal death, multiplies the merits of a good life, leads us to our everlasting home, and reanimates the body to eternal life.

Even more telling, perhaps, is that one can find the above quote all over the Internet—on blogs, on YouTube, on current church sites, even on Facebook. (This one I copied from the Facebook site for “The Eucharist.”) Indeed, because the Eucharist is no less central to Catholic faith today, we can find, seven centuries after Dante’s opus, Kevin Irwin proclaiming at the beginning of Models of the Eucharist that its purpose is “to reflect on the jewel of the crown of

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Catholicism—the celebration of the Eucharist” and “our central act of worship” (xiii). And for the Eucharist to be central means for Christ to be central, for that sacrament “is always about Christ as he existed before time,” as Irwin continues, as well as both “in time on this earth as he accomplished the paschal mystery, and outside of time as he now exists at the right hand of the father interceding for us in glory” (23). (Recall how Dante, in his lateral handling of his three canticles, actively expresses this very movement through time.) Groeschel and Monti are even more assertive about the cross-temporal supremacy of the Eucharist, declaring that it “has been and ever will be the center of life of the Catholic and apostolic Church” (12). We need hardly stop there: John A. Hardon, one-time advisor to Pope Paul vi, inquires if it really is any wonder that the Church calls the Eucharist the Mystery of Faith: Those who accept the Real Presence accept by implication all the cardinal mysteries of Christianity. They believe in the Trinity, … in the Holy Catholic Church which Christ founded and in which through successive generations is communicated to bishops and priests the incredible power of making Christ continually present among us in the Blessed Sacrament … . (“Eucharist and Sanctity”)

Another Jesuit, the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, once expounded in even more poetic terms on the Eucharist’s power to—to borrow one of Dante’s favorite verbs in Paradise—enkindle. In his 1916 essay “The Monstrance,” he narrates how an individual (very possibly himself) sensed, while praying, that the Host began mysteriously “to expand and grow bigger,” until finally the individual was fully enveloped by it, such that “the whole world had become incandescent, had itself become like a single giant Host … It had penetrated, through the channels of matter, into the inmost depths of all hearts and had dilated them to breaking point, only in order to take back into itself the substance of their affections and passions” (qtd. in O’Connor 288–289). The Dantesque character of this vision is hard to miss. We might also turn to the short-story writer Flannery O’Connor, who once attempted in a missive to articulate the Host’s mystery—or, rather, the relative inarticulability of its mystery. In this letter, she describes having visited another author, who had left the Catholic Church: [This author] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then

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said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I ever will be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable. (qtd. in O’Connor, “Foreword” xi)

When the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) described the Eucharistic sacrifice as “the source and summit of the Christian life,” quite patently it did not intend that portrayal as hyperbole (qtd. in Irwin 3). Indeed, the aforementioned Hardon, in another of his writings, expresses in even more certain terms how integral the Eucharist is to being a Catholic. Christ, says Hardon, is in the Eucharist with His human mind and will united with the Divinity, with His hands and his feet, His face and his features … with His living, pulsating, physical Sacred Heart. That is what our Catholic Faith demands of us that we believe. If we believe this, we are Catholic. If we do not, we are not, no matter what people may think we are. (“Eucharist and Christ’s”)

If Christ as being fully present in the Eucharist remains at the core of Catholic belief, so too does the relative abhorrence by outsiders—and perhaps by some closet insiders, too?—regarding the partaking of the flesh and blood of Christ. Not unlike in the 1200s, anxieties (and jokes) continue to this day to surface with respect to the Catholic act of “cannibalism.” Recently posted on the Facebook site of the “Catholic Church,” for instance, was the following, fairly sedate quote from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen: “The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white Host.” While “Liked” by 2700 individuals, the quote also drew the ensuing rancorous comment: “So the message you want to spread is that if you love someone or if they love you, you should eat their flesh and drink their blood? How is that love?” I cannot decide whether to sigh despondently at this sort of obloquy or to marvel at the way it reflects a millennia-long tension regarding that thin, white wheaten wafer. At the least, what it suggests is that Dante—if one accepts this book’s Eucharistic reading of the Comedy—tapped into something so existentially deep and theologically rooted that its legacy and affective implications have traveled clear into today’s electronic age. True, Dante was possibly writing in the guise of a doctrinally sound Catholic, with orthodoxy serving as a poetic veil whose deployment was more likely to lead to glorifiable artistic ends. I prefer, however, to take at face value Dante’s assertions that he was writing not as an “ordinary” poet but as a doctrinally sound Catholic. Like Hawkins, I envisage Dante “working from within a complex religious tradition and toward an unabashedly theological end—the

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conversion of the reader to a deeper knowledge and love of God” (Dante’s 10). While I feel no need or compunction to rigidly label Dante’s faith, nor even to measure the depth or extent of his faith, I do not think it can be disputed that his handling of the theme of Flesh is not only doctrinally sound but also quite exquisite. As Ernest L. Fortin points out, the sublimity of so much in Paradise seems an indication that Dante was an abiding Catholic (122). Through its subtle, evanescent, ungraspable presentation of Christ, Dante’s poetic vision manages to evoke that physically indiscernible Real Presence which, for the Roman Catholic, transubstantiation begets. In that sense, it is entirely logical to call Dante’s poem sacred, even sacramental—not because it is a relic or an object of worship but because, as Schwartz effectively proposes with respect to sacramental poetry more generally, “it does not contain what it expresses; rather, it expresses far more than it contains. Sacramental poetry points to a meaning greater than and beyond itself ” (6). I believe Dante would have fully endorsed this conception of his poem. What description, after all, could articulate the nature of Mystery more evocatively?

Notes 1 Joseph Mazzeo goes so far as to suggest that “The expression of [Dante’s] vision is a poem whose purpose, like that of Scripture, is to lead men to salvation” (41). 2 Seung observes that sometimes “this game of allegorical detection can go wild unless it is sanctioned to a systematic framework” (“Metaphysics” 123). Needless to say, I believe the Eucharist functions as part of Dante’s systematic framework—and gracefully complements the more common Three-Persons allegorical framework that scholars like Seung evince. 3 Kenelm Foster (who makes this claim) continues: “It may even be misleading to speak of the Comedy as a theological poem, though of course it contains much theology and certainly reflects in various ways the influence of St. Thomas. But this influence does not seem to me primarily doctrinal. I would prefer to describe it as primarily ‘culture’ and moral influence” (58). 4 Here, I am borrowing from Bonaventure’s description of “the triple substance of Christ, Who, is our ladder, namely, the corporeal, the spiritual, and the divine (Journey). 5 T.S. Eliot suggests that, for Dante, “A mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity” (“Sacred”).

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Index Note: The letter ‘n’ following locators refers to notes. accidents and substance 9, 17, 24, 29–30, 35, 41, 72, 120, 144, 187–90, 200n. 4 definitions of 187–8 transubstantiation and 188–90 see also Paradise Adam 67, 112, 120, 129, 131, 145, 163 and Christ 205–6 Aeneid 13, 56, 61, 62, 96, 201 Ahern, John 74, 75 Alan of Lille 27–8, 188 Albertus Magnus 54, 185 allegorical technique 5, 11, 197, 211n. 2 and the Comedy 2, 4, 5, 10, 80, 81, 90n. 6, 198 Eucharistic 13, 14 fourfold 11–12, 52, 90n. 7 and Mass 22, 51 see also Inferno; Purgatory; and Paradise Allen, Judson Boyce 14, 197, 198, 204 altar 20, 21, 32, 51, 102, 114, 132, 144, 175, 196 and reserved Hosts 162 Ambrose 19, 20, 42, 103 Anderson, William 12, 15, 16, 48, 50, 52, 116, 129, 192 Anselm of Leon 124, 140 Anthony of Padua 31, 33 apostles 6, 18, 22, 27, 29, 42n. 3, 55, 91n. 10, 110, 128–9, 159–61, 162, 163, 165, 171, 180 Apocalypse 116, 130, 156, 192 Aristotle 9, 24, 35, 40, 188, 192, 203n. 31 Armour, Peter 10–11, 15, 16, 116, 123, 127–30, 134, 135, 136, 141, 200 Arnold, John H. 30–1, 46 Astell, Ann W. 36, 172, 181–2, 185, 191, 194 Atchity, Kenneth John 95, 97 Auerbach, Erich 4, 15, 47, 111, 130, 138, 165, 179, 206, 207

Augustine 19–20, 42n. 8, 48, 76, 78, 104, 105–6, 143, 180, 185, 199, 200n. 1 Avignon popes Clement V 168 John XXII 157–8 Bale, Anthony 160 baptism 5, 8, 10, 63, 77, 122–3 see also Purgatory Barnes, John C. 5, 196 Barolini, Teodolinda 69, 89n. 1 Barraclough, Geoffrey 28 Beatrice 5, 48, 50, 90n. 2, 105, 137, 164, 166 see also Purgatory; and Paradise Benfell, Stanley V. 51–2, 104–5, 128–9, 145, 156 Bennessuti, Luigi 13–14, 16 Berengar of Tours 22–4, 43, 117 Bernard of Clairvaux 44n. 24, 107, 126, 166–9, 186, 199, 201n. 13, 202nn. 21–3 assault on materiality 180 on free will 107 as priest 171–2 saintly attributes of 168 on spiritual seeing 180 see also Paradise bestiaries 51, 63, 158 Bible 43, 52–5, 60, 75, 83, 103, 112–13, 124, 127, 128, 129 in medieval culture 116 New Testament 191, 205 Old Testament 83, 90–1n. 8, 127, 156, 205 -reading 51 see also John, gospel of; Purgatory; and Paradise Bloom, Harold 206 body 17, 54–5, 99, 121, 147, 172 bestial 57, 62–3, 65, 66

230

Index

Christ’s 2, 6, 7, 9, 17, 18, 19, 21–45, 58, 59, 66, 72, 76, 83, 85, 87, 88, 103, 107, 117, 133, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150–1, 154, 159, 160, 161, 163, 170, 171, 172, 179, 181, 189, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199 corporate 54, 69, 74, 75, 100, 196 human 54–5, 57, 64, 65, 72, 73–4, 75–6, 78, 84, 87, 119, 148, 158, 177 see also bread; Christ; Eucharist, the; flesh; and Inferno Bokenkotter, Thomas 12–13, 19, 20, 21, 26 Bonaventure 36, 45, 116, 139, 142, 187, 196, 211 on Eucharistic presence 151 Botterill, Steven 18, 47, 164, 168, 170, 187 bread 8, 9, 12, 74–5, 77–8, 79, 83–4, 104, 140–3, 177, 179, 191, 193, 207 change of, to Bread viii-ix, 17–46, 66, 132–3, 140 Christ as x, 1–2, 8–11, 15, 59, 104–5, 127, 140, 141, 205 miracles regarding 76–7 as reverse of cannibalism 81–4 as sacred food 57–8, 88, 104–5, 118, 141, 151, 180, 206 salvation through 102–3, 104 veil for 126 consecration of 2, 12, 17, 25, 42, 69 and Last Supper 6, 18, 106, 113 in Lord’s Prayer 104–5 and Trinity 193, 194 see also Bread of Angels; Christ; Eucharist, the; flesh; Inferno; John, gospel of; Purgatory; Paradise; theology, Christian; Thomas Aquinas; and transubstantiation Bread of Angels 9, 11, 36, 40, 104, 111, 137–204, 208 literalism of 142 see also Eucharist; Inferno; John, gospel of; Purgatory; and Paradise Burr, David 34–5, 38, 46, 143–4, 150, 200n. 4 Bynum, Caroline Walker 87, 181 Cabié, Robert 22, 26, 44n. 23, 179, 181–2, 203n. 29 Caesar, Michael 3–5, 15, 28, 90n. 7

Camille, Michael 71 Cangrande della Scalla and Eucharist 157–8 epistle to 3, 11, 12, 16n. 7, 52, 66, 90nn. 6–7, 133n. 2 cannibalism 7, 8, 10, 14, 17, 27, 41, 66, 67, 81–4, 120, 121–2, 137, 202n. 27, 210 human abhorrence of 75–6 see also Inferno Carruthers, Mary 202 Cassata, Letterio 54 Cassell, Anthony K. 55–6, 73, 90n. 6, 182 Cathars 27–30, 33, 34, 38, 39, 44nn. 24–30, 91nn. 10, 15, 107, 152–3, 169, 171–2 and desecration of the Eucharist 27–8, 54 see also heresy Catherine of Sienna 126 Cervigni, Dino S. 32, 136n. 32 Ceserani, Remo 86, 93n. 39 Chalcedon, council of 60, 70 chalice 20, 32–3, 38, 44, 184, 198 Cherchi, Paolo 62–3 Chesteron, G. K. 37, 40, 44 Christ viii-ix, 1, 2, 9, 12, 17, 18, 195, 204n. 35, 211 body and blood of 17–46, 62, 129, 198–9 as Bread 43, 175–200 and free will 107 as fruit 129–30, 178 Incarnate 49, 67, 97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 113, 120, 128, 154–5, 163, 170, 176, 177, 194–95 two natures of 60, 70 see also bread; Bread of Angels; Eucharist; flesh; food; Inferno; Paradise; Purgatory; and sacrifice Christianity, medieval 5, 6–7, 8, 10, 12, 19–46, 168 Church, the ix, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 31, 186, 17–46, 209, 210 corruption of 63, 91, 159 Militant 97, 101, 119, 128, 137, 161 perceived paganism of 207 Triumphant viii, 119, 159, 161 see also Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory

Index churches, medieval 20, 22, 29, 30–1, 51, 98, 114, 117, 144, 146, 155, 160, 164, 175, 182 Ciardi, John xii, 7, 8, 82, 84, 86, 95, 102, 115, 122–5, 128, 129, 130, 148, 158, 161, 164, 174, 188, 201n. 8 circle imagery 193–4 see also Paradise Clare of Assisi 34, 135, 194 Cogan, Mark 143 Collins, James J. viii, ix, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 12, 13, 15n. 4, 30, 95, 114, 126, 128, 129, 136n. 27, 138, 150, 155, 157–8, 160, 162, 172, 175, 189, 193, 195 Comedy, The antecedents of 47 and the Eucharist 10–11, 52, 137–40, 170, 201, 205–6 hermeneutical readings of 3–5, 13 multifaceted ways of reading 91, 206–7 polyvalency of 1, 11–13, 51–2, 81, 134 as sacred poem 10, 159, 205, 210–11 symmetrical structure of 7, 15, 47–51, 87, 89n. 1, 95, 102, 106, 107, 144, 199, 208 see also Inferno; Purgatory; and Paradise Constantine 20, 103 Convivio 55, 103, 141, 146–7, 183 Cook, Eleanor 112, 125, 126, 137 Cook, William R. 14, 73, 87, 88 Corpus Christ feast 8–9, 14, 33, 38–40, 41, 46n. 41, 59, 73, 95, 105, 107, 121, 123, 127, 135, 177, 191 Dante’s affiliation with 118–19 liturgy for 80–1, 140, 143, 173, 186, 189 original processions for 117, 119 origins of 39, 117–19, 177–8, 200–1 procession xviii, 8, 13, 14, 45, 73, 96, 137, 138, 184 see also Purgatory Coulton, G.G. 169 Craig, Clarence T. 122 Crespo, Angel 49 Croce, Benedetto 1, 174 cross/crucifixion 61, 64, 67, 74, 81, 85, 94, 122, 129, 155, 159, 191, 201 Christ and 19, 32–3, 53, 74, 85 see also Paradise; and Purgatory crusade 155, 202 Albigensian 29, 30, 152–3

231

Cruz, Joan Carroll 17–18, 20, 26–7, 32–3, 37, 39, 40, 44n. 21, 46, 62, 76–7, 171, 181, 183, 184–5, 186, 194, 199, 203n. 33 da Buti, Francesco 13, 116, 136 Damien, Peter 24, 102–3 Dante Alighieri and Bible 4, 10, 14, 51–2, 97 education of 5, 41 and heresy 53, 161 and history 67, 92 and religion 5, 6, 9–10, 41, 53–4, 183, 210–11 and Scholasticism 183, 189 in Triumph of the Holy Sacrament ix, 140 see also Comedy, the; Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory de Chardin, Teilhard 208 Didache 19 Di Noia, Augustine 107, 185 Divine Light, the 26, 55, 125 see also Paradise Dominic 28–9, 62, 152–3, 201 Dominicans 32 and Eucharistic presence 150–1 Dronke, Peter 192, 195, 198 Dunbar, H. Flanders 5–6, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 54, 115, 135, 154–6, 158, 183, 185, 200n. 7 Durling, Robert M. 53, 58–9, 74, 81, 82, 91, 92, 93n. 32, 103 Dyer, Joseph 20–1 eagle 129, 130, 134n. 7, 157, 158, 201n. 16 Easter 13, 30, 40, 42n. 5, 45n. 31, 53, 55, 62, 97, 98, 106, 109, 120, 133nn. 2, 18, 160 see also Purgatory Easting, Robert 197 Eden, Garden of 14, 61, 94n. 43, 111, 112, 129, 132 Eliot, T. S. 211n. 5 Eucharist, the 2, 6, 13–15, 17, 42, 59, 97, 98, 100, 103, 104–6, 110, 122, 126, 127, 137, 138, 150–1, 163, 168–9, 171–3, 185, 204–6 as binding heaven and earth 195–6 centrality of in Middle Ages 208 in modern era 208–10

232

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and the Comedy 96, 125 conceptual difficulty of 32, 34, 35, 38, 45, 178 as convertible by priests 120 and Dante 118 double signification of 41 history of 17–46 ineffability of 209–10 literalism and 179, 209–10 in the Middle Ages 19–46, 175, 181–2, 185, 196 as otherworldly 179–80, 184 protection of 30, 31–2, 38 purity of 41, 58, 68 and quest for the Holy Grail 133, 194 sacramental realism of 42 spiritual seeing and 105–6, 179–80 sweetness and 187 as terrestrial 178–9 see also bread; Bread of Angels; accidents and substance; Inferno; Purgatory; Paradise; and Real Presence; transubstantiation Exodus ix, 186 see also Purgatory

Florence 3, 10, 34, 56, 87, 94, 134, 155, 164 Baptistery in 94 Foley, Edward 18, 20, 21, 22, 43, 142 food 8, 33, 36, 58, 79, 82, 99, 185, 197–8, 199 Christ as 129–30, 177–8, 179, 192, 206 Eucharistic 11, 30, 36, 39, 40, 78, 79, 88, 96, 206, 208 word of God as 30, 156–7 see also Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory Fortin, Ernest L. 5, 211 Fortune, wheel of 69, 100, 198 Fosca, Nicola 14 Foster, Kenelm 49, 64, 90, 150, 206, 211 Fourth Lateran Council (1215) 9, 29–30, 45, 152, 171 canons of 29, 30, 32, 171 Francis of Assisi 28, 31, 36, 135, 166, 171, 172, 201 Franciscans 28, 44, 45, 118 and Eucharistic presence 150–1, 171, 173 Freccero, John 1, 14, 79, 80, 81–2, 83, 89, 92n. 30, 93n. 32, 94, 139–40, 174, 202n. 26, 208 Frossard, André 207

faith viii, x, 2, 5, 17, 23–4, 25, 32, 35, 37, 48, 49, 139, 140, 178, 192, 195, 206, 207 in the Eucharist 39, 88, 100, 108, 140, 181–2, 184, 186, 190, 196, 208–10 and reason 8, 9, 23, 107–8, 114, 106, 107–8, 111, 114, 178, 192 see also reason; Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory Federn, Karl 48, 95, 145 Fergusson, Francis 108, 109, 110 Fisher, Lizette Andrews 14, 39, 116, 117, 118–19, 121–2, 125–6, 134n. 14, 136n. 29, 137, 186, 190 Fitzpatrick, P. J. 31, 34, 62, 77, 92n. 29, 149, 194 flesh viii–x, 6, 7–8, 9, 40, 43, 89, 125, 132, 140, 142, 144, 172, 178, 192–3, 199, 208–10 Christ’s 7–8, 21, 24, 27, 32, 37, 54, 211 horror of 7 ingesting Christ’s 2, 26, 32, 186 see also body; bread; cannibalism; Eucharist; Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory

Gardiner, Eileen 47 Gaudoin-Parker, Michael L. 12, 78, 195, 199 Gilson, Étienne 186, 206 Giotto 49, 87, 191 God attempts to circumvent 67–8 as Father viii-ix, 7, 17, 18–19, 20, 49, 50, 55, 63, 71, 80, 86, 88, 97, 130–1, 132, 139, 142, 157, 170, 171, 176–7, 183–4, 193, 194, 196, 209 as hidden 40–1, 186 medieval conceptions of, as Trinitarian 193, 194–5 Triune 15, 54, 107, 139, 152, 185, 190 see also Paradise Grant, Gerard 22, 25–6, 27, 28 Grayson, Cecil 13, 15, 206 Griffin 13, 135, 136, 139, 148 see also Purgatory Groeschel, Benedict J. and James Monti 17, 19, 26, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 40, 41, 46, 53, 107, 117, 118, 122, 133, 184, 201n. 7, 207, 209 Grundmann, Herbert 27, 29

Index Hamilton, Bernard 27, 28, 31, 34, 35, 45, 97, 139 Hardie, Colin 124, 125–6, 135 Hardon, John A. ix, 1–2, 8, 173, 202, 209, 210 Hardt, Manfred 48, 50, 90, 183, 191 Harnack, A. 42 Hart, Thomas Elwood 49, 152, 176 Havely, Nick 193–4 Hawkins, Peter S. 1, 2, 4, 75, 95, 97, 100, 109–10, 115, 116, 117, 121, 125, 134, 139, 145, 146, 159, 172, 176, 192, 193, 194–5, 206, 211 heresy 6, 7, 26–7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 40, 44–5, 130, 148, 150, 152, 153, 169, 171–2, 201 Arian 183–4 and the Eucharist 26–7, 34, 36 see also Cathars Herzman, Ronald B. 14, 73, 82–3, 87–8, 89, 137, 195 hoc est corpus meum 6, 25, 144, 198–9 Hoffman, Donald L. 71–3, 74, 92, 121 Hollander, Robert 15, 47, 49, 90, 93, 110, 133n. 3, 138, 166 Holy Week 53 medieval celebrations of 53, 85 Host, elevation of the 22, 25–6, 44, 77, 120, 181, 182, 196 see also Eucharist hosts, making of 21, 42, 142, 154, 179 Hugh St. Victor 25, 38, 143, 202 hunger 7, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 108, 111, 112, 126, 127–30, 141, 142, 143, 146, 160, 187 Incarnation, the 2, 10, 52, 54, 66, 67, 69, 70, 86, 97, 139, 148, 162, 170, 175, 176, 194 see also Purgatory Inferno 7, 13, 14, 47–94, 95, 137, 149, 198 Agnèl 65, 161–2 Alberigo, Friar 84, 85 alchemy 71–3, 120 allegory of the Spirit and the Letter 89 Bertran de Born 69 blood 62, 154 bodies impersonation 73 imprisonment 158 limbo 86 violence to, human 68–70, 73, 74, 81

233 Branca D’Oria 84, 85 Caiaphas 64, 159 cannibalism in 66, 74–5, 77–85, 87–8, 89, 93 Cavalcante 70, 92 Christological resonances in 52–3, 54–6, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 73, 79, 80–1, 82–3, 85, 86, 93–4 double natures in 60–1, 63, 67, 69–70 eating in 60, 61, 68, 74, 75, 84 Eucharistic resonances in 53, 55, 56, 57–8, 59, 62, 63, 64–5, 66, 69, 72–3, 74, 81–2, 83, 84, 87–9, 91, 176 faith and 54, 58, 76, 77, 80–1 fathers and sons 67, 70–1, 73, 78–80, 82, 92 flesh/Flesh 57–8, 61, 62, 66, 69, 73, 80, 83, 84, 85 fleshy matter 57, 59–60, 61, 62, 68, 84, 85, 88–9 flight 59, 63, 86 food 57–8, 78–9, 81–2, 85 Francesca and Paolo 4, 57, 67, 91 Geryon 59, 62–3, 91 Gianni Schicchi 73 Griffolino d’Arezzo 71 Guido d Montelfeltro 68 heretics in 58, 102 imago pietatis in 58–9, 60, 86 Inf. I 53–6, 194 Inf. II 56, 170, 176 Inf. V 57, 68 Inf. VII 68, 100 Inf. IX 93, 185 Inf. X 58–9, 70, 102, 150 Inf. XI 59 Inf. XII 59–60, 68 Inf. XIII 60–2 Inf. XIV 154 Inf. XVII 59, 62–4 Inf. XIX 63–4 Inf. XXI 158 Inf. XXII 159 Inf. XXIII 64 Inf. XXIV 64–5, 161 Inf. XXV 64–6, 161 Inf. XXVI 67–8 Inf. XXVII 68 Inf. XXIX 71–3, 120

234

Index

Inf. XXX 73–4 Inf. XXXII 74–5 Inf. XXXIII 78–85, 92–3, 131–2, 176 Inf. XXXIV 85–9, 94 Judas 86, 87 Lucifer 86–8 Master Adamo 73–4 merging/coupling in 57, 60, 61, 65, 66, 67, 161 metamorphosis in 62, 65, 72 Minotaur 59–60, 61, 68 Mohammed 68–9 Myrrha 73, 92n. 26 numerical symbolism in 55–6 popes in 63–4 resurrection 54, 55, 58, 63–7, 71, 76, 82, 84, 86, 87 Ruggiero 74–5, 78, 89 sacramental eating and 75 similitude of nature in 71, 73 suicide trees 60–1 bleeding of 62 three beasts in 55–6 transubstantiation, parody of 66, 161–2 Trinitarian symbolism in 63, 70, 86, 87, 88, 94, 154 Ugolino 74–5, 78–9, 81–3, 88–9, 92–3, 131–2, 177 Ulysses and Diomed 67–8 Vanni Fucci 64–5, 161 Virgil in 56, 57, 60, 88 Isidore of Seville 71 Jacoff, Rachel 61–2, 76, 77, 88, 91n. 17, 92n. 26, 93n. 37, 114, 122, 163, 176, 177 Jerusalem 131, 145 see also Purgatory Jews 18 and Christ’s words 83, 142 and the Eucharist 34 Joachim of Fiore 193–4 John, gospel of 8, 55, 56, 68, 104–5, 115, 116, 118, 122, 127, 130, 139, 142–3, 205 Bread of God in 142 commentaries on 143 John of Damascene 194 Justin Martyr 122–3

Kessler, Herbert L. 101, 179–80, 192 Kilmartin, Edward J. 22, 23, 25, 27, 37, 43, 117–18 Kimel, Alvin 189 Kirkham, Victoria 113, 135 Kirpatrick, Robin 100, 133 Kleinhenz, Christopher 49, 50, 94, 109, 111 Krahmer, Shawn 135 Kyrie eleison 49–50 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy 27 Lahey, Stephen E. 189 Lambert, Malcolm 27, 28–9, 31, 34, 41, 44–5, 153, 169 Lanfranc 23, 43, 117 Lansing, Carol 27, 29, 31, 33, 34, 39, 40, 45, 46 Last Supper, the 12, 18, 51, 80, 85, 91, 106, 205 Latini, Brunetto 49 LeGoff, Jacques 5 Leigh, Gertrude 56, 92, 194 Leupin, Alexander 134 Levy, Ian Christopher 188 Lewis, R. W. B. 53, 134 literalism in Dante’s Comedy 67, 81, 82, 88 Jewish 101 regarding religious doctrine 21, 22, 31–2 and truth 140, 142 Little, Stephen M. 13, 14, 15, 46, 67, 118, 136, 196, 205–6 Louis IX 33 Lucan 65, 92 Lucifer 7 medieval depictions of 87 see also Inferno Lydgate, John 95, 96, 105, 123, 177, 190–1 MacAllister, Archibald 50, 102 Macy, Gary 171, 188, 196 Mandelstam, Osip 52 Mary, the Virgin 21, 92n. 26, 202nn. 22, 27, 203n. 34 associations with the Eucharist 102–3 see also Paradise; and Purgatory Mass, Roman Catholic 12–13, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 44, 45, 53, 85, 95, 97, 106, 163, 170, 171, 176–7, 181, 196 medieval 43, 175

Index as a sacrifice 29 see also Eucharist Mazza, Enrico 18, 19, 21, 22, 38, 42n. 2, 43n. 15, 45n. 37, 141, 180, 186 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony 175, 211n. 1 Mazzotta, Giuseppe ix, 4, 119, 141 McGinn, Bernard 96, 171, 205 metatextual church 132, 134, 144, 152, 196, 203 see also Purgatory Migiel, Marylin 91 miracle(s), Eucharistic 7, 32–4, 62, 76–7, 194, 203 of Bolsena 33, 39, 77, 118 Mitchell, Nathan 120 Moevs, Christian 90, 158 Moloney, Raymond 18, 19–20, 21, 22–4, 25, 26, 117, 171, 190, 203n. 31 monstrance 34, 183, 184–5, 209 Moore, Edward 95 Morgan, Alison 94n. 41, 96, 191 Morgan, David 195–6 Morison, James Cotter 169 Murtaugh, Daniel M. 201 Musa, Mark xii, 53, 55, 59, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 78, 82, 84, 85, 86, 92n. 19, 98, 100, 116, 129, 133n. 5, 141, 145, 149, 150, 151, 157, 159, 162, 187, 201n. 10 mystery viii, 15, 111, 192, 194–5, 211 of Eternal Light in Paradise 194, 198 of the Eucharistic 78, 82, 89, 108, 114, 158, 170, 199, 208, 209–10 faith in 139, 149, 209, 211 of Incarnation 2, 10, 53, 85, 155, 178, 209 of Roman Catholic mass 21, 51 of salvation 80 of transubstantiation 11, 15, 24, 29, 43n. 14 of Trinity 49, 128, 151 mystery plays, early liturgical 119–20 Nardi, Bruno 206 Nicaea, Council of (325) 18 Nicene Creed 49 Nortz, Basil 141 O’Brien, William 14 O’Connor, Flannery 209–10

235

O’Connor, James T. 19, 43 Oldcorn, Anthony 64, 65–6, 92n. 20 Orvieto, Italy 33, 34, 39 Ovid 61, 62, 65, 73, 145 Palazzo, Eric 106 Paradise 7, 9, 14, 41, 49, 52, 66, 96, 110, 111, 113, 131, 137–204, 208, 209 Albert of Cologne in 150 Alfa ed O (Alpha and Omega) 161 allegory 142, 144, 162, 165, 182, 185 ascension 159–60, 167 Beatrice 138–9, 146, 157, 158, 159, 161, 179, 200 Benedict 158–9 Bernard of Clairvaux 163, 164–70, 174, 176, 177, 181, 182 appearance of 164–5 and Church 168–9 devotion to Virgin Mary 169–71 and Eucharist 168–9 prayer of 174, 176, 177 rationale for, as guide 166, 169–70 bodily sacrifice 163 Bonaventure 147, 150, 153 bread 156–7 Bread of Angels 141, 146 literalism and 141, 142, 146 Christ 154, 155, 158, 159–60, 170, 172 anticipation of 160 blood and body of 154–5, 162, 164 Dante as type of 156 duality of 148 face of 194–5 as Pelican 162, 163 Church Militant 146, 161 Church Triumphant 161 circle imagery in 149–50, 152, 153–4, 157, 158–9, 161, 162, 164, 174, 175, 178, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 202 coextensivity of real and metaphorical 142 critics’ responses to 138 cross/crucifix 150–1, 154, 158, 159, 162, 169, 173, 191 Dominic 147, 150, 152–3 doublings in 148 doves 162–3 eagle 158, 201

236

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Eternal Light 174, 181, 183–5, 187, 188, 192, 191 Eucharistic resonances in 140, 145, 147, 151, 152, 154, 157–8, 159, 161, 170, 172, 176–200 as food 146–7, 151 as pearl 147 faith 139–41, 143, 145, 148, 153, 158, 160–1, 165, 166, 169, 176, 178, 193 and reason 141, 147 flesh/Flesh 140, 142, 144, 148, 152, 159–60, 162, 172–3, 177, 178, 186, 190, 192, 193, 197, 199 Folquet de Marseilles 152 food 141, 142, 144, 146–7, 150–1, 155–6, 157, 160, 161, 178, 193, 197, 199 digestion of Dante’s words 156–7 Francis in 150 free will 146 geometer 174, 178 Glaucus 145 God’s essence in 175–6 grace 139 hope 160, 163 hunger and thirst, metaphors of 146 hymns in 148, 149, 160 Eucharistic 162 imperceptibility of 140, 141 Incarnational resonances 148–9 ineffability of 139–40, 145, 154, 159, 174, 176, 190 James, the apostle 162, 163 John, the apostle 162, 163 Justinian I 148–9 Lamb of God 156, 161, 162 language in, limits of 177, 178 law of non-contradiction, play with 147, 148 light 154, 155, 159, 162, 163–4, 165, 182–4, 187 love 150, 164, 167 and Eucharist 147, 154 God’s 198 mandorla 191 Mary, the Virgin 160, 165, 169, 174–6, 177, 181, 195, 197 coalescence of contraries in 176, 177 and Eucharist 172–3 as Mediatrix 170–3

as oven for Living Bread 160, 173, 177 as vessel for Christ 170–1, 173 Mass and 163 metatextual church and 155, 160, 164 moonspots 200 mother and child motif 160, 170 mystery 139, 174, 175, 176, 198 Mystic Rose 172 papal corruption 163 Par. I 144, 145 Par. II 138–9, 141, 145, 147 Par. V 146 Par. VI 148 Par. VII 185 Par. VIII 152 Par. IX 149, 150, 152 Par. X 146, 149, 151, 201 Par. XII 147, 149, 150, 153 Par. XIII 147, 149, 151–2, 201 Par. XIV 149, 153–4, 155 Par. XVIII 157 Par. XXII 158–9 Par. XXIII 145, 155, 159–60 Par. XXIV 161 Par. XXV 162 Par. XXVI 163 Par. XXVII 163 Par. XXVIII 163 Par. XXIX 163 Par. XXX 163–4, 165 Par. XXXI 103, 164, 167 Par. XXXII 170, 172, 173, 200 Par. XXXIII 154, 155, 174–200 accidents and substance in 187, 192 critical disappointment with 174–5, 187 critical interpretation of 175–6 Eucharistic reading of 176–200 Paul 161 Peter, the apostle 161, 162 Peter Damian 158–9 Peter Lombard 150 reason and 138–9 resurrection 159, 165, 185–6, 191 Scholasticism/Scholastics in 146, 149–53 seeing 160, 161, 174, 175, 181–3, 187 Solomon 154

Index souls in 138, 149 sun 144, 149, 158, 176, 182 time and 144, 172 Thomas Aquinas in 150 transhumanize (trasumanar) 145 Trinitarian resonances in 149, 151–2, 154, 161 Trinity in 54, 175–6, 190, 193, 201 Christ in 176, 194–5 triune symbolism in 174–5, 192–3 truth/Truth 142, 147, 181, 187 undividing/dissolving as a motif 149, 154, 159, 167, 176 veil in 185 Paul 13, 108, 139, 176 Pearl 197–8 pelican, Christ as 9, 162, 163 Pertile, Lino 92 Peter Lombard 36, 45n. 36, 143, 190 Peterson, Thomas 69 Petrarch 3 Petrie, Jennifer 68 popes Agapetus 148 Anastasius II 59 Boniface VIII 63–4, 68 Gelasius I 20 Gregory I 42n. 10, 45n. 33, 157, 178, 195–6 Gregory VII 23, 43 Gregory IX 31 Gregory X 10, 181 Innocent III 28, 29, 34, 45n. 34, 51, 153 John XXII 45, 118 Leo IX 23 Nicholas II 23 Urban IV 39–40, 117–18 establishment of Corpus Christi feast 177–8 Transiturus 39–40 limits to language in 177–8 see also Avignon popes Price, Merrall Llewelyn 43n. 20, 81, 87, 202n. 27 purgatory 12 doctrine concerning 96–7 medieval versions of 96 Purgatory 8, 11, 13, 14, 48, 49, 52, 58, 73, 95–136, 137, 139, 144, 145, 148, 196, 197, 198 allegorical masque 114, 128–30

237 baptism 122–3, 131–3 Beatrice 97, 100, 115, 119, 122–8, 130 interpretations of 115–16, 119, 120, 135, 136 Bible in 97, 98, 99, 112, 113, 114–17, 133, 135 Exodus 97, 98, 104, 113, 118, 119, 127 New Testament 104, 105, 109, 110, 111 blood of Christ 101, 111 chariot/cart 123, 124, 128, 130 Christ Incarnate and 96, 97, 105, 106, 108–9, 111, 112, 113, 115, 119, 122, 124–5, 128, 131 Christological resonances in 96, 97, 99, 100, 108, 109, 110, 113, 118, 119–22, 123–5, 126, 128, 129–30, 132 Church Militant 97, 100, 101, 102, 105, 109, 119, 125–6, 128–31, 133–4 Church Triumphant 119 Corpus Christi procession and 96, 117–20 cross/crucifix 98, 103, 105, 106, 111, 113, 115, 122, 129, 132, 134 doubling in 113 Earthly Paradise 111, 112, 124 Easter 97, 98–9, 104, 106, 109, 119–20 Eucharistic resonances in 97, 99, 102, 103, 104–6, 108, 112, 114, 119–21, 122–3, 126, 130, 132–3, 136 Eunoë 131, 132 Eve 128 faith 102, 106, 107–8, 111, 114, 117, 124, 126 flesh/Flesh 97, 100, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114, 120–1 food 99, 108, 110–11, 121 spiritual 126–7 free will 106 gluttons 111–12 Griffin 113, 122, 123–5, 128 critical interpretations of 123–4, 126–30 as Eucharistic 126–7 twofold nature of 122–5, 127–8 Heavenly Pageant 114–17, 115–28, 128, 178 critics on 114–15, 117, 118 description of 115

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hymns in 97, 98, 100–1, 102, 115, 122, 128, 130 Jerusalem 95, 102, 109, 111, 113 Lethe 122, 123 liturgical universe of 101–2, 104, 122 Mary, the Virgin 100, 102–3, 105, 110, 111, 130, 131, 132 Mass, Roman Catholic 97, 98, 102–3, 104, 106, 122 Matilda 122, 128 mediated Christ in 113, 114, 123 as metatextual church 95, 97, 99, 101, 102, 106, 112, 113–14, 117 Mount Purgatory 67–8, 97 Purg. I 98 Purg. II 99, 104 Purg. III 99–100 Purg. IV 100 Purg. VIII 100–1, 185 Purg. IX 102 Purg. X 102–4 Purg. XI 104 Purg. XII 104 Purg. XIII 104, 105 Purg. XIV 104, 133, 153–4 Purg. XV 104, 105, 106 Purg. XVI 106 Purg. XVIII 108 Purg. XIX 108 Purg. XX 109 Purg. XXI 109 Purg. XXII 110–11 Purg. XXIII 111 Purg. XXIV 111 Purg. XVII 114 Purg. XXIX 120, 134 Purg. XXX 115 Purg. XXXI 123–5, 148 Purg. XXXII 115, 125–9 Purg. XXXIII 130–2, 136 Rachel and Leah 113 real and virtual in 105, 108, 111 renewal and return 98, 103–4, 110 resurrection 97–8, 103, 109, 110, 119, 120, 122, 124, 130, 131, 140 seeing, via reflection 123, 125, 127, 128 sins, removal of 122 Statius 109–10 and Christianity 109–10 as figural Christ 110

sun 123, 125 symbolic barrage 99, 102, 103–4, 106, 108–9, 110–11, 112–17, 129 Terrace of Pride 102–4 terrestrial Christian world in 95, 102, 109, 110, 111 tree, fruit-laden 110, 111, 112 Tree of Knowledge 128 Trinitarian resonances in 99, 100, 133 veiled access 126 Virgil 99, 102, 108, 109, 112, 114, 115, 119, 123 and paganism 109, 115 Word of God 120 Quinones, Ricardo J. 70–1 Radbertus 21–3, 43, 186 Radding, Charles and Francis Newton 22, 24 Raffa, Guy P. 57, 60, 61, 65, 66, 69, 86, 93n. 36, 124, 125, 139, 148, 192 Ragg, Lonsdale 97 Raimondi, Ezio 98, 101, 133 Ralphs, Sheila 94n. 43, 97, 119, 129, 135 Ransom, Daniel J. 141 Raphael viii, 140 Ratramnus 22, 23, 43 Raw, Barbara C. 193 readers, medieval 51, 102, 114, 140, 168–9 Real Presence 1–2, 7, 8, 12, 28, 32, 33, 40, 50, 77, 85, 117, 127, 138, 154, 168, 179, 189, 205, 208, 211 see also Eucharist reason 56, 138–9, 141, 147, 178, 192, 200 Reformation, the 3, 4, 207 denunciation of “God of Bread” by 207 relics, saints’ 31, 39 resurrection 13, 18, 63, 64, 71, 84, 86, 87, 124, 159, 191 see also Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory Reynolds, Barbara 48, 50, 53, 56, 87, 90n. 2, 117, 126, 136n. 31, 175–6 Rogers, Elizabeth Frances 24, 42, 43, 45 Ross, Charles 101–2 Royal, Robert 47, 81, 91, 130, 142, 145, 146, 147, 154, 200n. 5 Rubin, Miri 6, 26, 32, 38, 41, 45, 46, 51, 75–6, 83, 90n. 4, 92n. 25, 117, 135n. 20, 154, 169, 173, 179, 187, 202n. 22, 208

Index Ruggiers, Paul G. 56 Russo, Vittorio 61, 68 Rychlak, Ronald 76, 77, 194 sacramental eating 38 reading 2, 15 signs 170 thinking 17 see also Eucharist sacraments ix, 10–11, 13, 15, 16n. 6, 19, 25, 27, 28, 34, 38, 42nn. 7, 9, 43n. 17, 63, 95, 105–6, 134n. 12, 141, 157, 169, 175, 180, 200n. 2 see also Eucharist sacrifice 18, 64, 163, 171 Christ’s 12, 18, 32, 35, 52, 54, 70, 80, 82–3, 99, 122, 132, 154–5, 172, 177, 195, 196, 197, 199–200, 205, 206 of free will 146 Mass as a 29, 37–8, 97, 210 Saiber, Arielle 105, 106 Saint Patrick’s Purgatory 9, 96, 120–1, 197 food in 197 Saint Paul’s Apocalypse 197 Sanguineti, Edoardo 86–7, 93 Saxon, Elizabeth 170–1, 180, 203 Sayers, Dorothy 1, 2–3, 14, 117, 135 Schism, Great (1054) 42 Schnapp, Jeffrey T. 72, 73, 128–9, 145, 176 Scholasticism 24–5, 35–8, 39–40, 47, 187, 188–9 Schwartz, Regina 17, 198–9, 207, 211 Second Vatican Council (1962–5) 210 seeing and Eucharist 22, 25–6, 31, 207 material versus spiritual 68, 179–80 medieval theory concerning 181, 182, 185 spiritual 180, 181, 182, 190 Seung, T. K. 10, 165, 174–5, 193, 211 Shapiro, Marianne 82 Sheen, Fulton J. 210 Shinners, John 30–1, 32, 34, 96 Shoaf, R. A. 138 Sinclair, John xii, 98, 99–101, 102, 110, 111, 117, 124, 127, 128, 130, 131, 133n. 2, 135n. 23, 144–5, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 157, 160, 161, 171, 173, 187–8, 201nn. 13, 15, 203n. 34

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Singleton, Charles ix–x, 9, 14, 15, 50, 85, 90n. 6, 94n. 40, 115–16, 152, 165 Smarr, Janet Levarie 109, 110 Snoek, G. J. C. 21, 30, 31, 117, 184 Sommerfeldt, John R. 167 Soukup, Paul 77–8, 80 Stambler, Bernard 112, 122, 123–4, 127, 128, 129, 130–1, 134n. 8 Stephen of Autun 143 Stephens, John 34 Stone, Darwell 18–19, 24–5, 30, 35, 37, 41n. 1, 42n. 4, 150–1, 169, 197–8 Stone, Gregory B. 54, 91n. 9, 165, 179, 206–7 Storey, H. Wayne 114–15, 130 sun 54, 100–1, 106, 183–5, 191 monstrance 183, 184–5 Tamburello, Dennis E. 167 Teresa of Avila 186 Tertullian 42, 58 theology, Christian ix–x, 3, 11, 13, 15, 19, 26–7, 55, 139 and accidents and substance 9, 51 and the Comedy 4, 5, 6, 8, 11–12, 13, 18, 50, 67, 95, 102–3, 109, 115, 117–18, 124, 126, 127, 131, 140, 143, 205, 206, 211 and the Eucharist 20, 21–6, 29, 35–6, 45–6, 75–6 see also Eucharist, the; Paradise; and Thomas Aquinas thirst 108, 109, 110, 127, 142, 146, 155–6, 160, 186 Thomas Aquinas 8–9, 35, 36–9, 48, 57–8, 61, 64, 80–1, 94, 104–5, 107, 117–18, 139, 140, 141, 149–51, 166, 181, 182–3, 185–6, 190–1, 196, 199, 211 on accidents and substance 188, 194 on cannibalism 83 and the Comedy 37, 54 and Corpus Christi feast 38, 40, 118, 140, 143, 173, 181, 182, 189–90, 186 and the Eucharist 45–6, 88, 89, 143, 181, 185, 194, 199–200, 208 on Eucharistic conversion 37–8 theological system of 37 on transubstantiation 188–90 medieval critics of 189 see also Paradise Thurston, Herbert 26–7, 91, 184

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Transfiguration 128–9, 145, 163, 165 transubstantiation viii-ix, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 17, 20, 24, 25, 43, 45, 62, 66, 70, 72, 99, 117–18, 120–2, 131, 140, 145, 147, 177–9, 188–90, 191, 195–6, 198, 205, 207, 211 as doctrine 29–30, 139, 152 and love 199 see also Eucharist; and Paradise tree, forbidden 58, 61, 178 Treherne, Matthew 10, 11, 14, 41, 83, 89, 95, 102–4, 112, 162, 178 Trinity viii–ix, 7, 10, 45, 49–51, 126, 131, 139, 140, 151, 175, 176, 183–5, 191, 193–5, 200, 203, 209–10 doctrine of 37 inseparability of three natures 139, 183–4 see also Inferno; Paradise; and Purgatory Triumph of the Holy Sacrament viii, 140 Truijen, Vincent 10 Ugolino episode 3–4, 7, 13, 87, 202 critics on 79–80, 81–3 historical account of 82 see also Inferno Ullén, Magnus 198 Ulysses 101, 108 see also Inferno Van Ausdall, Kristen 173, 181, 182, 185–6, 188 van Meckenem, Israel 195

Vasari, Giorgio 12 veil 1, 11, 101, 120, 126, 173, 179, 185 and the Comedy x, 2, 10, 11, 80, 112, 179, 210 in the Comedy 84, 85, 101, 119, 121, 125, 126, 185 presence of Christ under the 1, 21, 31, 126, 173, 185–6 Verdon, Timothy xiii, ix viaticum 10, 27, 36, 119, 200 Villani, Giovanni 93 Virgil 164, 176, 198 see also Inferno; and Purgatory vision literature 96, 197–8 see also Saint Patrick’s Purgatory Vita Nuova 50, 90, 100, 105, 116 Vonier, Abbot 170, 178 Vossler, Karl 1, 47, 52, 166 Waldensians 44 Watt, Mary Alexandra 14–15, 87–8, 95–6, 98–9, 101, 102, 104, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113–14, 132, 134n. 7, 137, 141, 144, 152, 155, 160, 164, 179, 203n. 28 Wawrykow, Joseph 196, 204 Whalen, Teresa 8, 10, 23, 24, 38, 144 Wicksteed, Philip H. 37, 107, 183, 203 Wilson, A. N. 54, 80, 96, 97, 166, 170 Yates, Frances A. 78, 80, 82