Virgil And Dante

11 Pages 2787 Words

How can Dante make himself at once a champion of Virgil, loyally following in the master's footsteps (as at the conclusion of Inferno XXIII), while he simultaneously condemns the master to hell? Why does Dante, who treats Virgil's texts with more deference (even with veneration) than did any Christian writer before him, at the same time subject these very texts to a hostile scrutiny which we would be less surprised to find in the pages of St. Augustine? To approach such questions, we do well to have some sense of the «problem of Virgil» as this has been met and formulated by Dante's readers. The problem has an interesting history, and the answers offered since the earliest days of Dante criticism, reveal the troublesome nature of the questions themselves.
It is a disconcertingly widespread assumption, from the earliest commentators onward, that Virgil is not to be understood as a historical figure in Dante's poem, but rather as an allegorical expression, either of Reason in general or as the rational capacity within every man (or at least in this man, Dante Alighieri). This formulation, in whatever version, was born, I would suggest, of the union of Surprise and Embarrassment («Virgil? Dante must have meant something else» __ we can hear even a Pietro di Dante or a Boccaccio murmuring). It remains the most popular view of Dante's Virgil, even today. In it, both Roman poet and Roman poem are «de-historicized», and thus cleansed of their offensive pagan coloration. A good dozen of the most intelligent of the commentators during the first quarter millennium of interpretation of the poem greet Virgil's miraculous apparition in Inferno I with the perhaps reassuring (but certainly impoverishing) gloss, «id est rationalis philosophia», or «ratio naturalis». The phenomenon occurs just as readily outside of Italy. Most of us have grown up with like-minded commentators at our elbows (at random I have opened to the gloss in The ...