SOURCE: Nevin, Thomas. “Ser Brunetto's Immortality: Inferno XV.” Dante Studies 96 (1978): 21-37.

[In the following essay, Nevin argues that Dante's placement of Brunetto in the seventh circle of hell in the Inferno, alongside the sodomites, usurers, and blasphemers, is meant to suggest the Florentine scholar's embodiment of the “sterility of intellectual pride” rather than his guilt for engaging in the physical sin of sodomy.]

In the Pilgrim's meeting with Brunetto Latini (Inferno XV), Dante creates an episode of poignant intimacy unsurpassed in all of the Commedia. Clearly, it seems, Dante intends that, like the hapless Pier della Vigna, Brunetto should compel our sympathy and, like the awesome Farinata, command our respect. The deferential “voi” (vv. 30, 35, 80, 83) by which the Pilgrim addresses his former master serves to convey a pity and a reverence tinged with irony. But unlike Pier, Farinata, or any other citizen of Dis, Brunetto holds a special claim upon the Pilgrim, the affectionate bond between preceptor and student. Yet, the character of that bond, and hence of Dante's debt to Brunetto, has not, I think, been sufficiently appreciated in relation to the damnation Brunetto suffers in Hell's seventh circle.

Shortly before their arrival in that circle, Virgil explains to the Pilgrim the vices peculiar to its rings (XI, 28-51), of which the third is described thus:

Puossi far forza ne la deïtade,
          col cor negando e bestemmiando quella,
          e spregiando natura e sua bontade.

(46-48)¹

Among these blasphemers, sodomites, and usurers, Brunetto apparently belongs to the middle denomination, “spregiando natura.” In fact, his status on the fiery plain lies ambiguously median to the titanic blasphemer, Capaneus, of Canto XIV and the Florentine sodomites of Canto XVI. Brunetto himself avers that he does not belong to the latter: “Gente vien con la quale esser non deggio” (XV, 118).

In his Dante sous la Pluie de Feu, André Pézard has argued with considerable elaboration that Brunetto is a blasphemer no less than Capaneus. The giant, lying prone to the rain of fire, is suffering the hundred years' torment Brunetto knows he himself must face if he stops running (XV, 37-39). Whereas Capaneus' violence to God is open and vociferous defiance, Brunetto's is subtler but essentially akin to it.² His Trésor, the French encyclopaedia he composed while in exile (1260-1266), has, claims Pézard, “l'air de proférer un blasphème délibéré contre sa langue maternelle”; as language was God's first gift to man, renunciation of its direct transmission from one generation to another is an offense to the Creator.³ That is, by writing in French instead of in his native Italian, Brunetto broke the chain that links civilization and earthly happiness to divine providence. Pézard's argument is so thoroughly developed that no summary can accord it full justice, but one further point that he makes deserves mention here: in presuming that rhetoric is a science achieved by art rather than by nature (Trésor, III, i, 10), Brunetto reversed the order established by God.⁴ Brilliantly errant though he may be in some of his arguments, Pézard here affords the ground for a figurative sodomy as Brunetto's damning fault.⁵

There seems to be no documentary evidence that Brunetto Latini was a sodomite. But, as the commentator, Cristoforo Landino, dryly remarks, men of letters are often tainted by sodomy “per avere copia di giovanetti.”⁶ Although Brunetto's reputation in Florence rested primarily upon his secretarial functions for the commune, including diplomatic offices, one might extend Landino's accusatory generalization to him through the Pilgrim's testimony that Brunetto was his teacher (XV, 82-85). And it is as a practitioner of poetic art that Brunetto hopes to be remembered (XV, 119). The implications of these passages I shall explore later.⁷

Before examining Brunetto as we find him characterized in Canto XV, it is only just to allow him to speak for himself on the matter of sodomy. In the second book of Li Trésors, an iteration, in part, of the Nicomachean Ethics, he classifies it among the evil desires: “Delit par male nature est gesir avec les malles, et des autres choses deshonorables” (II, xxxx, 4).⁸ Almost identical is the verdict in his compendium of the Ethics: “Ed è dilettazione per mala natura, si come giacere colli maschi, e tutte le altre cose vituperevoli.”⁹ It is well to note that thereby Brunetto does not follow Aristotle's own characterization of sodomy as a species of pathological or habitual incontinence, ἁὶ δὲ νοσηματώδειs e ἔξ ἔθουs, to be distinguished from moral depravity, μοχθηρία (Eth. Nic. 1148b, 15-31). It appears that, like Dante, Brunetto was an unflagging Christian moralist.

But was he, then, a hypocrite? The surprise which the Pilgrim evinces when he sees Brunetto, “Siete voi qui?” (XV, 30) might suggest only that Brunetto's vice was not publicly known; for dramatic purposes the Pilgrim shares in a general ignorance of which the Poet, Guido Cavalcanti and other young men of Latini's scuola had probably long been disabused. The commentator Niccolò Tommaseo piously observes that “né si può credere che il Poeta lo calunii, egli che gli si mostra così rispettosamente affezionato,” and indeed so unerring was Dante's sense of justice that he would not have laid a charge without justifiable foundation, least of all toward a man to whom he felt deep intellectual indebtedness.¹⁰ His reverence and affection, however, precluded any inclination to place Brunetto in the train of the lead-cloaked hypocrites.¹¹

In the opening tercets of Canto XV, before Brunetto appears, Dante, as is frequently his practice, leaves clues for the reader which adumbrate the character of the sin. As conversion serves throughout the Commedia as the indispensable predicate to grace and salvation, so is reversion or regression an action which imperils spiritual progress.¹² At Purgatory's Gate, for example, the angel will warn Dante of such a danger: “… ma facciovi accorti / che di fuor torna chi 'n dietro si guata” (Purg. IX, 131-132). In leaving the wood of the suicides, Virgil and the Pilgrim had gone so far that “i' non avrei visto dov' era, / perch'io in dietro rivolto mi fossi” (XV, 14-15). Whether Hell's dimensions are so vast may well be doubted in view of Dante's diminutive effects immediately preceding this remark (10-12), but it is clear that a turning backward in the spirit means a weakening, if not loss, of vision. It is precisely that defect which the sodomites bear as they appear running toward Virgil and the Pilgrim.¹³

The lunar simile which Dante introduces to depict their short-sightedness—“come suol da sera / guardare uno altro sotta nuova luna” (18-19)—is the more striking in reference to Brunetto's remarks in the Etica on desire: “E la concupiscenza si addomanda li luoghi oscuri, e perciò è detto di concupiscenza ch' ella abbatte lo figliuolo e trade lui.”¹⁴ By the simile of the enfeebled tailor's attempt to thread his needle, Dante compounds the motif of dim vision and prepares the reader for an aged Brunetto.¹⁵ Yet, the pathos of the sodomites is qualified; though only toward the end of the canto does the reader learn of Brunetto's distinguished company, “tutti fur cherci / e litterati grandi e di gran fama” (106-107), their collective designation as “famiglia” (22) in a generic rather than literal sense evokes the image of an even more eminent group, the “filosofica famiglia” of Limbo (IV, 132). There is an irony resonant in the comparison, for many of the clerics and litterati damned in the seventh circle were more than probably Aristotelian scholars, devotees of “il maestro di color che sanno” (IV, 131), as, indubitably, Brunetto himself was.

The tactile imagery which introduces Brunetto hints at a seductive aspect in his sodomy: “mi prese per lo lembo” (23-24) and “'l suo braccio a me distese” (25) again recalling the maestro's telling remarks in the Etica: “E spezialmente nel tatto grande delettazione è. E perciò è bestiale cosa a seguitare troppo la delettazione del tatto.”¹⁶ More important to Brunetto's character, however, is his greeting to the Pilgrim upon recognition, “Qual maraviglia!” (24), for “maraviglia” twice serves as a crucial epithet in Il Tesoretto, a poem which Dante must have known well.¹⁷ In speaking of Natura, which he has personified as his instructor, Brunetto writes: “Ben ha grande potenze / Che, s' io vo' dir lo vero, / Lo suo alto mistero / E' una maraviglia” (934-937). It is Natura that directs him in the poem to Filosofia, the four cardinal virtues and Ventura. Of the virtues he tells us: “E strane maraviglie / Vidi di ciascheduna” (1248-1249); each is personified to voice Aristotelian dicta on proper conduct. Remarkably, the three Christian virtues are absent.¹⁸

Thus, from Il Tesoretto one might infer that the scope of Brunetto's imaginative capacity to wonder was limited to philosophical allegory. He lacked an eschatological imperative, the contemplative end toward which the Commedia moves. Throughout Canto XV, Brunetto's language remains almost wholly limited to the vocabulary of natural phenomena. When he asks the Pilgrim, “Qual fortuna o destino / anzi l'ultimo dì qua giù ti mena?” (46-47), his referent is, of course, the Ventura of his Tesoretto, a force analogous to the inscrutable Fortuna upon which Virgil discourses in Canto VII. While Dante's Fortuna is a creature of God, there is no hint that Brunetto conceived of Ventura in such a way.¹⁹ “Destino” might seem to imply a divine providence, but Brunetto's injunction, “Se tu segui tua stella” (55) suggests that he may have understood celestial guidance only in terms of stellar influences.

The Pilgrim's reply to his master's queries is carefully conceived to keep Brunetto in the spiritual darkness of his damnation. His perception is and remains feeble, for like all the others in Hell he has lost any sense of divinity, “il ben de l'intelletto” (III, 18). Far different is the Pilgrim's vision; through the charred visage he perceives Brunetto, fittingly, with his mind's eye: “‘l viso abbrusciato non difese / la conoscenza süa al mio ‘ntelletto” (27-28).²⁰

Brunetto's pathetic plea to the Pilgrim, “O figliuol mio, non ti dispiaccia” (31), betokens the dramatic exchange of roles between master and student.²¹ Perhaps more important, it marks, albeit only temporarily, a shift in direction, “ritorna in dietro” (33) which as it were momentarily alters Brunetto's character from a squint-eyed sodomite to a sagely and solicitous companion. When Brunetto turns back, he becomes once more the urbane Florentine to whom Dante had once given youthful fealty.

The Pilgrim's compassion for Brunetto requires, however, cautious measure. Brunetto himself enforces it in explaining the terrible penalty he must suffer if he stops (37-39). Benvenuto da Imola provides a revealing gloss on this tercet: “… qui facit residentiam in habitum sibi in isto vitio, raro recedit, et non sine magna difficultate.”²² An even more dire punishment for violation of a running pace is part of the sodomites' contrapasso for having violated the measure of natural desires in “la vita bella” (57). So, in complement, reason and instinctual dread prevent the Pilgrim from leaving the metron symbolized in the elevated channel. It is a pungent irony that the Aristotelian norm under divine justice precludes reunion of the humanistic master and the Christian poet.²³

Virgil's eloquent silence, broken only once and much later in the scene, sustains the drama concentrated between Brunetto and the Pilgrim and thus furthers the ambiguity couched in the Pilgrim's reply to Brunetto's “chi è questi che mostra ‘l cammino?” (48). Whether homosexual jealousy²⁴ or the rivalry of pride prompts Brunetto, his failure to perceive Virgil, a poet and exemplar of rational virtue, indicates once more his soul's myopia. The homely diction of “reducemi a ca per questo calle” (54) artfully works both to suggest in an almost literal sense Virgil's pedagogic function and to conceal the higher mystery of his appearance in the selva oscura. Thus, Brunetto mistakes a cue to speak wistfully of his own fortune (58-60); presuming gratuitously upon his own power, he blindly slights the heavenly beneficence that guides the Pilgrim through Hell. Yet, as the home to which Virgil is leading the Pilgrim is the beatific vision of Paradise, so the “glorïoso porto” (56) and the “stella” (55) of Brunetto's prophecy figure as goals in the celestial pilgrimage. Brunetto, in his earthbound narrowness of vision, uses these words solely in the honorific sense conveyed by Dante's astrological sign, Gemini, as the promise of worldly fame.

Although a quondam expositor of ancient wisdom, Brunetto serves no such purpose here—that is Virgil's office—but he gains brief stature in the prophetic license exercised as the peculiar endowment of all those within “questo cieco carcere” (X, 57-58). The vehemence in his six tercets of invective against Florentine vices is distinctly reminiscent of Ciacco's attack in Canto VI. The affinity of these diatribes cannot be incidental since the weight of their charges lies in identical terms: both indict their fellow cittadini for “superbia, invidia e avarizia” (VI, 74; XV, 68). And, as the predacious evils of Florence, “piena d' invidia sì che già trabocca il sacco” (VI, 49-50), find their symbol in Ciacco's own gluttony, so too might Brunetto in some way represent the very ills he decries. Although sodomy was reputed to be an especially Florentine vice, it may serve figuratively as an expression of man's narcissistic concern for his own status, subsuming pride, envy and greed. Nowhere are its manifestations more perverse to man's nature than in his intellect, the highest development of which is the Aristotelian telos or end of human endeavor.²⁵

It is from Brunetto's own mouth, then, that Dante condemns him, but the justice of the verdict rests not upon Aristotelian ethics. As the retributive fires that destroyed Sodom rain here upon the seventh circle, the deeper nature of the sin which they punish is exposed in biblical parables.

The organic imagery dominating Brunetto's invective—the degeneration of Florentine stock from Catiline's time, the vegetative symbols of the Pilgrim himself—assumes prophetic force greater than the immediate context might suggest, by evocation of similar imagery in the Old and New Testaments. When, for example, Brunetto speaks of his and Dante's Florentine enemies as “lazzi sorbi” (65) among which “si disconvien fruttare il dolce fico” (66), Dante evokes God's words to Jeremiah on the Judean victims of the Babylonian captivity and those who remained secure in their own land:²⁶

Calathus unus ficus bonas habebat nimis, ut solet ficus esse primi temporis: et calathus unus ficus habebat malis nimis, quae comedi non poterant, eo quod essent malae.

(Jer. [Jeremiah] 24:2)

God foretells that the good shall return to Him in fullness of heart, but for the evil

dabo eos in vexationem, afflictionemque omnibus regnis terrae, in opprobrium, et in parabolam, et in proverbium, et in maledictionem in universis locis, ad quae eieci eos.

(Jer. 24:9)

The proverbial taunt and curse from which Florence has suffered by “vecchia fama nel mondo” (67) is blindness, akin, perhaps, to that which afflicted the Sodomites at Lot's door (Gen. 19:11). Apart from the historical basis of “orbi” (67), the blindness which Brunetto indicts is a spiritual defect; having its correlative in “lazzi,” it is not a privation nor corruption, but an impotence, an incapacity to fruition.²⁷

The Florentine seed, bearing the treacherous line of Catiline, lies upon rocky, infertile soil, “e tiene ancor del monte e del macigno” (63). In the parable of the sower, Christ speaks of the seed that falls among thorns and cannot come to fruition due to the soul's lack of rootage and the distraction of worldly concerns, “sollicitudo saeculi istius et fallacia divitiarum” (Matt. 13:22).²⁸ The republican traitor, Catiline, figures from the subsequent parable as the enemy who sows tares among the wheat (13:25).²⁹ Brunetto hopes that the Pilgrim, as the ripening fig among thistles (Matt. 7:16), may be cleansed of the inherent evils damaging the Florentine race: “dai lor costumi fa che tu ti forbi” (69). Such a purgation is necessarily a rebirth that is incorruptible (I Peter 1:23), but Brunetto intends a renascence of “la sementa santa” (76) of the Roman republic dear to a Ciceronian humanist.³⁰ Rome as the seat of the Christian church is indeed “santa” in the higher sense veiled to Brunetto's comprehension. Again, he has spoken in an ironic ambivalence that he himself cannot grasp.

The prophetic tercet within Brunetto's denunciation, verses 70-72, sustains the metaphoric structure of the whole. Dante learns that the factious will seek to devour him, but “lunga fia dal becco l'erba” (72).³¹ As Brunetto's foresight is limited to the earthly span of the Pilgrim's exile, he may hope for a rebirth of the ancient Roman seed, but he cannot perceive the teleological nature of the “pianta.”³² Hence, the Pilgrim's readiness before the designs of Fortune must appear to Brunetto a kind of stoic resignation to fate rather than the Christian acceptance of providential ways which it indeed signifies.

That Brunetto is damned, not in his Guelf partisanship nor even in his putative sodomy, but rather by a particular lack of spiritual vision, now becomes evident. Like all men, he is a victim of the cupidity which aborts the fruition of the will to consonance with the will of God (Par. XXVII, 121-126), but the distinctive character of Brunetto's cupidity remains to be determined. He and his company are overtly guilty of a carnal desire that is perverse because it makes what is natural, sterile; but they are learned men as well. Analogously, then, it may be that Brunetto's very accomplishments of intellect offer the key to the darkness of his mind and the diminution of his vision.

It is the Pilgrim's own errancy that reveals fully the damning faults of his one-time master. In Purgatorio XXXI, Beatrice obliges the Pilgrim to confess his dereliction from a youthful devotion to her: “Le presenti cose / col falso lor piacer volser miei passi” (34-35). The preceding canto provides through Beatrice's reproach a depiction of this deviance in terms strikingly reminiscent of the thematic tension of Inferno XV:

Non pur per ovra de le rote magne,
          che drizzan ciascun seme ad alcun fine
          secondo che le stelle son compagne,
ma per larghezza di grazie divine,
          che sì alti vapori hanno a lor piova,
          che nostre viste là non van vicine,
questi fu tal ne la sua vita nova
          virtüalmente, ch' ogne abito destro
          fatto averebbe in lui mirabil prova.
Ma tanto più maligno e più silvestro
          si fa ’l terren col mal seme e non cólto
          quant' elli ha più di buon vigor terrestro.

(XXX, 109-120)

Having followed Beatrice, his “stella,” to the “glorïoso porto” of Paradise, the Pilgrim is forced to recognize that in what Brunetto had called “la vita bella” (57), and he himself “la vita serena” (49), his mind's rich potential had been sown with evil tares. Is it not probable that Brunetto, whether personally or by a not distant example, was the sower? Charles Williams has written that of all the inhabitants of Hell Brunetto “is indeed the nearest to the shape of a damned Beatrice.”³³ In him, then, Beatrice would rightly have found her deadliest foe to the claim of Dante's spiritual guidance. Against her maternal-sororal suasions, Brunetto stood as a figure of paternal authority, “la cara e buona imagine paterna” (83; see XVII, 10). To him, not to Beatrice, Dante seems to pay the highest tribute of a devoted follower: “m' insegnavate come l' uom s'etterna” (85). But, as “ad ora ad ora” (84) may hint, Brunetto instructed for a bogus time-measured eternity; its promise was merely the perpetuation of one's literary fame through the esteem accorded by succeeding generations. It is for such hollow acclaim that Brunetto enjoins the Pilgrim when divine justice parts them:

Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro,
nel qual io vivo ancora, e più non cheggio.

(119-120)³⁴

In the vainglorious manner common to other souls in Hell, Brunetto betrays a deluded and fruitless concern for worldly attainments. He, like Farinata, presumes to live on through his progeny. One may even read in his request an implicit attempt at self-exoneration from the flaw which damned him (see Inf. XIII, 73-75). But Dante himself does not dwell upon the sin; the Pilgrim's reverence is the promised payment of a debt (86-87). Brunetto achieves thereby some measure of the glory he characterized in Li Trésors as a life beyond death.³⁵ His instruction of the Pilgrim in “how man makes himself immortal” seems to refer to literary creation, but in those few words may lie rather the damnation of a deviant Aristotelian humanism.

Toward the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle proclaims: “It is not necessary for one being a man to think as a man nor being mortal to think as a mortal, but rather it is necessary as much as one can to be immortal [ἐφ' ὅσον ἐνδὲχεται ἀυανατίζειν] and to do all things according to the most powerful life of things in one” (1177b).³⁶ That “most powerful life” in man is nous, the intellectual power by which man enjoys, albeit briefly, affinity with the gods. Brunetto was familiar with this exalted notion of the mind; he paraphrases Aristotle's remark in Li Trésors as well as in his compendium of the Ethics.³⁷ But, although “li tres millour delit sont trové en philosophie por la sollicitude de eternité,”³⁸ philosophy, Aristotle would admit, does not confer immortality.³⁹ Neither is the speculation of the philosophic intellect a means of communion with the godhead, but rather the highest imitation of it conceivable to men.

But, Brunetto's literary achievements attest no speculative discipline, no vita contemplativa. The compilation known as Li Trésors is a secular thesaurus defining the scope of human knowledge and endeavor.⁴⁰ In Il Tesoretto, Natura assumes the Virgilian role of instruction and exhortation to the philosophy of the four cardinal virtues. The pilgrim poet, penitent of his offenses against God and the Church (2891-92), proceeds confidently in words that adumbrate Inferno XV, 95-96: “Io metto poca cura / D'andar a la Ventura.” However sincere his piety and contrition, Brunetto is not intellectually a Christian poet.⁴¹ Neither by contemplation nor by grace does he chart the mind's road to God.⁴² The Ptolemy whom he elected as his guide to the stars for the uncompleted section of Il Tesoretto would surely not have bestowed upon him the blinding illuminative vision of Beatrice.

Brunetto's earthly felicitas, his “vita bella,” was not contemplative and hence was not akin to the divine; it was active in the secular sense of “tota humana” as defined by Albertus Magnus,

nihil ad deos habens similitudinis, et multas habet poenitudines. … In multis enim necesse est quod fortunae se commitat politicus, quorum nihil immescetur felicitati contemplativae.⁴³

Like Dante, the worldly Florentine magister had experienced the adversities of fortune, but he had survived them only to persist in a vainglory the sham of which they had exposed, “per amor di cosa che non duri” (Par. XV, 11).

It is because Brunetto did not ascend to the lasting joy of the contemplative life for which his intellect might have prepared him, that he, like the Florentine “sorbi,” is unripened.⁴⁴ Only in that sense can he, in his seventy-fourth year, claim to have died “per tempo” (58). Because of that failure to ripen, he does not comprehend the nature of the Pilgrim's journey; “veggendo il cielo a te così benigno” (59) sounds a note of piteous irony, for no more than any other denizen of Hell can Brunetto now understand the workings of grace, yet “virtüalmente” he might have attained that humbling perception in life and thus have saved his soul. Then, indeed, “dato t'avrei a l'opera conforto (60). Abusive of his intellect, Brunetto remains what St. Paul calls the “animalis homo [qui] non percipit ea, quae sunt Spiritus Dei” (I Cor. 2:14); accordingly, his erudition is the confounded foolishness of the wise (see I Cor. 1:19; 3:19). The tailor feebly attempting to thread his needle now appears a telling image of Brunetto's intellect unaided by the wisdom which grace alone confers.

When the mind fails to direct itself back to its natural home in God, it becomes sterile; without conversion, there can only be diversion and corruption. Saint Paul, the Pilgrim's predecessor in the journey through Hell, writes paraphrastic to Aristotle that man the corruptible must “put on incorruption” and as a mortal put on immortality (I Cor. 15:53). He speaks, however, not potentially, by the Aristotelian qualification “as much as possible,” but unconditionally; one is saved or damned, utterly. The exile that Brunetto suffers, “posto in bando” (81; see I Cor. 5:9-10), is not simply the sodomite's death but an intellectual failure to make himself incorruptible in the Christian sense of a contemplative acceptance of grace. Impotent, he is not a “damned Beatrice,” but what Dante would have been, finally, without Bcatrice.⁴⁵ And nowhere short of purgation would Dante have learned, certainly not from Brunetto, Oderisi's lesson on the vanity of those earthly accomplishments by which Brunetto presumed to give himself life beyond death (see Purg. XI, 91-117).

In Hell's seventh circle, the Pilgrim is far from a full realization of Brunetto's tragedy, but the Poet had of course learned the lesson well before, in the years “nelle scuole de' religiosi e alle disputazioni de' filosofanti.”⁴⁶ The imperative to inform a secular education with theological study Dante had realized most surely from exposure to Fra Remigio de Girolami, lector of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. In biographical terms, Remigio, an accomplished rhetorician and a lecturer on the Nicomachean Ethics, is the foil to Brunetto Latini, for it was through him that Dante, and Florence, received Thomism's imaginative synthesis of pagan and Christian doctrine.⁴⁷ But in Inferno XV, Brunetto's adversary is Saint Paul, the true instructor of “how man makes himself immortal.” In defining the goal toward which the Pilgrim is moving, Saint Paul illuminates the mordant irony with which the episode of Canto XV concludes:

Nescitis quod ii qui in stadio currunt, omnes quidem current, sed unus accipit bravium. Sic currite ut comprehendatis. Omnis autem, qui in agone contendit, ab omnibus se abstinet, et illi quidem ut corruptibilem coronam accipiant: nos autem incorruptam. Ego igitur sic curro, non quasi in incertum. Sic pugno non quasi aerem verberans sed castigo corpus meum, et in servitutem redigo; ne forte cum aliis praedicaverim, ipse reprobus efficiar.

(I Cor. 9:24-27)

Brunetto suffers reprobation from Dante because he failed to subordinate his intellectus possibilis to the divine claims upon it. Alone, the natural intellect is ultimately sterile, for only with spiritual vision can its potential be fulfilled.⁴⁸ Without that vision, all the scruples of the Aristotelian metron are vain; unless there be a mortification of one's nature, a dying of the natural seed to put off its corruption, there can be no assumption of immortality. Having run a worldly course to achieve a wholly human, and so aborted, glory, Brunetto now runs a race for which there is not even that corruptible crown as a prize. When the Pilgrim sees his master running back to his troop as one “che vince, non colui che perde” (124), Dante subtly underscores not only Brunetto's pathetic futility but as well a certain defectiveness of vision he had imparted to his acolyte. As toward Francesca, the Pilgrim's sympathy here, however attractively and seductively humane, evidences an incapacity to understand a sinful nature, for the Pilgrim still shares that nature. But “parve” (123) suffices to suggest that, while Brunetto's triumph is in fact merely apparent and illusory, there is hope that the Pilgrim's vision, though impaired, will be fully restored.

In Dante's own interpretive terms, the moral lesson of Brunetto Latini is the sterility of intellectual pride. Anagogically, it is clear that only when the will turns man's rational powers in a subordination to God, does man's intellect become fruitful. Only by such loving action does man prepare himself for “quello infinito ed ineffabil bene che là su è” (Purg. XV, 67-68).⁴⁹ Divine justice prescribes that Brunetto be stationed amid the blasphemers and the usurers, for, like Capaneus, Brunetto, in seeking his own immortality, slighted the divine dispensation of grace; and, like the Scrovigni and Ubriachi, he attempted to draw a kind of perpetual interest from his literary fame. “Sic est qui sibi thesaurizat et non est in Deum dives” (Luke 12:21).

Notes

1. All citations of the Commedia are from the critical edition by Giorgio Petrocchi, La Commedia secondo l'antica vulgata (4 vols.; Milano: Mondadori, 1966-1967).

2. Pézard suggests that “Capanée pourrait être l'empie qui défie la puissance de Dieu et Brunet serait l'impudent qui ne croit pas l'offenser, sans doute, mais qui tout compte fait la blasphème par de folles théories; ce qui n'implique pas le moins du monde qu'il ait le coeur irreligieux.” See André Pézard, Dante sous la Pluie de Feu (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1950), p. 77.

3. Ibid., p. 94.

4. Ibid., p. 108. This charge might seem to lie more suitably with those who scorn nature, the sodomites.

5. It seems preposterous to argue, for example, that Brunetto's composition in French was a “renunciation” of his mother tongue and thus “une sorte de suicide intellectuel” (p. 97). Paris, after all, was the center of Aristotelian learning in Dante's time; Saints Thomas and Bonaventura had taught there, and every learned Florentine would probably have had some knowledge of French. Besides, Brunetto wrote in verse a shorter version of the Aristotelian tenets of Li Trésors, Il Tesoretto, which includes the “Penetenza,” a confession that should effectively disqualify any imputation of impiety toward God and the Church.

6. La Divina Commedia nella figurazione artistica e nel secolare commento, a cura di Guido Biagi (Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1924), vol. I, p. 415.

7. Although Villani described Brunetto Latini as the educator of all Florence, it may be doubted whether he served officially as a teacher or tutor to Dante, but it is inconceivable that Dante had no personal contact with him. See La Cronica di Giovanni Villani, a cura di Celestino Durando (Torino: Tipografia e Libreria Salesiana, 1880), Vol. III, p. 25.

8. Li Livres dou Tresor de Brunetto Latini, ed. Francis J. Carmody, in University of California Publications in Modern Philology, XXII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), p. 207.

9. Etica d'Aristotile compendiata da Ser Brunetto Latini (Venezia: Società Veneta dei Bibliofili, 1844), p. 59.

10. Biagi, Vol. I, p. 404.

11. The Inferno affords several instances of secondary sin: Vanni Fucci is a blasphemer, Ulysses and Diomedes are thieves, and Boniface is guilty of many sins beyond simony, yet for none of their extraneous vices are these sinners punished.

12. See Luke 17:32.

13. A gloss on verse 16 by “l'Ottimo” is misleading: “la qual fiamma impedía la vista, sicché [i soddomiti] non poteano bene essere consociuti,” since it is the sinners' vision that is impaired, not Dante's nor Virgil's, as the rest of the tercet makes clear. See Biagi, Vol. I, p. 402.

14. Etica, p. 59.

15. The complex of evil desire; physical emblems of constraint upon it; moonlight and floodtide, and the threading of the needle recur in Purg. X, 1-16. The biblical suggestivity of the needle (Matt. 19:24) is appropriate to the vices of a rich man who cannot enter God's kingdom, the author of Li Trésors and Il Tesoretto. See Matt. 6:21.

16. Etica, p. 32.

17. An extensive list of some stylistic debts which Dante may have owed to Latini is provided in Francesco Mazzoni's “Brunetto in Dante,” the preface to the 1967 reprint of the Ricciardi edition of Il Tesoretto, pp. xi-lx. All quotations are from this edition.

18. Instances of “maraviglia” in the Vita Nuova attain the mystical number of Beatrice, nine.

19. A commonly cited paradigm from the Aeneid, VI, 531-533, is instructive in telling us what Brunetto does not ask:

    sed te qui vivum casus, age fare vicissim,
    attulerint. pelagine venis erroribus actus
    an monitu divum? an quae te fortuna fatigat?

    Dante seems to have transposed “casus” and “fortuna” but not the far more critical “monitu divum,” which figures as his chain of grace, from Mary to Virgil, in the Commedia.

20. An irony in the scorching of Brunetto's features is evident from a passage in the Convivio where Dante compares the planet Venus to la Rettorica on the basis of “la chiarezza del suo aspetto” (II, xiii, 13-14). Most of Trésor III is a discussion of rhetoric, “de bone parleure.”

21. The “traccia” (33) Brunetto leaves to join the Pilgrim recalls the “traccia” of the half-bestial centaurs ringing Phlegethon (XII, 55) among whom is Chiron, famed as the educator of heroes.

22. Biagi, Vol. I, p. 404. A thoroughgoing Aristotelian, Brunetto was at least intellectually aware of the force of habit: “Remuer les muers et les us est plus legere chose que remuer nature. Et neporquant remuer usage est grief chose pur cou k'il est semblables a nature.” See Li Trésors II, xxxx, 7, and Ethica Nicomachea 1152a, 29-31.

23. Benvenuto's reading points to the hazard posed by Brunetto's rhetorical skills: “debemus honorare virtutem in istis talibus infamibus, et loqui cum eis per transitum, ne eorum nimis propinqua et frequens conversatio redderet not infames.” See Biagi, Vol. I, p. 405. Italics mine.

24. See Gen. 19:5.

25. Lorenzo Guelfi's thesis that Brunetto's sin was not sodomy but onanism, the damning power of which he had underestimated, is perhaps even more suitable to the idea of narcissistic corruption, but sodomy provides the requisite social dimension of sexual vice. See Lorenzo Guelfi, Nuovi Studii su Dante (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1911), p. 168. Guelfi's argument does remove Brunetto from the charge of hypocrisy in his condemnation of sodomy.

26. All biblical citations are from the Biblia Sacra e Vulgata Editione (Venetiis, 1720).

27. Dante speaks in closely comparable terms in his apostrophe to the proud Christians in Purg. x, 121-129.

28. The figurative sense of “macigno,” rendered by Boccaccio as “duro e non pieghevole ad alcuno liberale e civil costume,” complements Brunetto's secular meaning but must be extended in Christian terms to signify the spiritual sterility of unregenerated nature. See Biagi, Vol. I, p. 407 and Matt. 21:19.

29. As conspirator and rebel, Catiline is in secular miniature to the Satanic sower of the tares. In Paradise, however, Folquet describes Florence as the plant of Lucifer himself (IX, 127-129). Of mankind as the devil's fruit tree see Saint Augustine's De nuptiis et concupiscentia I, 23, 26.

30. Cicero's aesthetic delight in a ripened fig may be what Brunetto feels in his solicitude: “primo est peracerba gustatu dein maturata dulcescit … Qua quid potest esse cum fructu laetius, tum aspectu pulchrius?” See Cicero, De Senectute, XV, 52. On the lascivious denotation of ficus see Ludwig Blanc, Vocabolario Dantesco (Leipzig: n.p., 1852), s.v. fico; see also Inf. XXV, 2.

31. See Hosea 2:12. It is not probable that Dante uses “erba” metonymously for “pianta,” since grass is seasonal and without the vital potential of foliage. In both Testaments, grass is often metaphoric of human life or flesh, but nowhere is it the prey of beasts in any sense relevant to Dante's usage. See Purg. XI, 115-117.

32. See Purg. XXXIII, 143-145.

33. Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice (reprinted, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Cudahy, 1961, c1943), p. 130.

34. Although one may concede to Karl Vossler, Mediaeval Culture, Vol. I, trans. William Lawton, 1929; rpt. New York: Ungar, 1958, c1929, pp. 180-181, that Dante's knowledge of Platonism was limited to the Timaeus, Plato's dismissal of the sophist's manual, of which Li Trésors is exemplary, has here a twofold application which justifies lengthy citation. Defending the efficacy of the spoken or dialectical word against the written, Socrates tells young Phaedrus that “anyone who leaves behind him a written manual, and likewise anyone who takes it over from him, on the supposition that such writing will provide something reliable and permanent must be exceedingly simple-minded” Phaedrus 275c (Hackforth tr.). Books are forever mute to one who, desiring instruction, may wish to pose questions, as the Pilgrim does to his guides through the three realms. Plato's metaphor of the seed cultivated in dialectic is peculiarly appropriate to the imagery of Inf. XV, 61-78: “The dialectician selects a soul of the right type, and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge, words which instead of remaining barren contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters; whereby the seed is vouchsafed immortality, and its possessor the fullest measure of blessedness that man can attain unto” Phaedrus 276e-277a (Hackforth tr.). The pertinence of these remarks is apparent later in my argument.

35. “Glore done au preudome une seconde vie; c'est a dire que aprés sa mort la renomee ki maint de ses bones oevres fait sambler k'il soit encore en vie” (II, CXX, 1).

36. For similar injunctions see Timaeus 90b and Plotinus, II, 9. 9, 45-49. Eth. Nic. 1177b is paraphrased in Convivio IV, xiii, 8 by derivation from a passage in the Summa Contra Gentiles I. c, v. For a discussion see Edward Moore, Studies in Dante, First Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), p. 105.

37. By operation of the speculative intellect “è l'uomo assomigliato a Domenedio e alli suoi angeli,” who enjoy the most noble life “perciò che si sono sempre in continova speculazione.” See Etica, p. 85; also Li Trésors II, xxxxvii, 8, 9.

38. Li Trésors II, xxxxvii, 4.

39. See the Topics IV, 5, 126b, 35-37.

40. In W. Goetz's words, Brunetto “will für gebildete Laien schreiben und stellt deshalb die Wissensgebiete voran, die der Laie für sein menschliches und politisches Dasein braucht.” See Walter Goetz, “Dante und Brunetto Latini,” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, XX (1938), 82.

41. Dante may have regarded Brunetto's Penitenza as a “poetica finzione, non reale, efficace penitenza” according to Guelfi, p. 171.

42. “… in vita contemplativa homo communicat cum superioribus, scilicet cum Deo et angelis, quibus per beatitudinem assimilatur.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II,, Quaestio III, Art. V. (Italics mine.)

43. Albertus Magnus, Liber X Ethicorum, Tractatus II, Caput II.

44. According to Saint Thomas, the contemplative life does not in itself ensure blessedness: “omnis autem cognitio quae est secundum modum substantiae creatae, deficit a visione divinae essentiae,” but though man cannot attain beatitude by his own intellectual powers, conversion through the free will prepares him to receive it. See Summa Theologiae I-II, Quaestio V, Art. V.

45. It is imagistically right that at the conclusion of the Purgatorio Dante, expressing his renewal through Beatrice's ministry, speaks of himself in terms that recall Inf. XV, 74: “rifatto si come piante novelle / Rinovellate di novella fronda” (XXXIII, 143-144).

46. Convivio II, xii, 7.

47. A characterization of Remigio, based upon the reading of his secular tracts, explains the attraction the youthful Dante must have felt toward the Dominican friar and friend of Thomas Aquinas: “ein praktisch orientierter Denker … der das wirkliche, das pulsierende Leben seiner Zeit beobachtet und der mit einer unverkennbaren Lebendigkeit persönlicher Anteilnahme und auch mit Temperament zu den Fragen des öffentlichen und wirtschaftlichen Lebens seiner Zeit Stellung nimmt.” See Martin Grabmann, “Die Wege von Thomas von Aquin zu Dante” Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, IX (1925), p. 34. On the claim that Siger of Brabant was Dante's teacher see Etienne Gilson, Dante the Philosopher, trans. David Moore (London: Sheed and Ward, 1928), p. 262, n. 2.

48. See Par. XXXIII, 103-105. Brunetto's “immortality” is predicated at best upon only two of the three kinds of intellectual endeavor known to man, as defined by Albertus Magnus: actio virtutis moralis and factio artis; but only in the third, speculatio intellectus contemplativi, does man participate in the nature of a divine activity. See Liber X Ethicorum, Tractatus II, Caput II.

49. It is surely not an accidental symmetry that in Canto XV of the Purgatorio, Virgil admonishes the Pilgrim with a lesson Brunetto had never learned:

    … Però che tu rificchi
    la mente pur a le cose terrene,
    di vera luce tenebre dispicchi.

    (64-66)