him. Johannes Mendelssohn (Bericht über Rossetti; Ideen neuern Erlaüterung des Dante und der Dichter seiner Zeit, Berlin, 1840) responded enthusiastically. Ozanam appropriated much of the material that Gabriele had given him to hold in trust and adapted it to his own orthodox purposes (Dante et la philosophie catholique au 14.^e siècle, Paris 1839). Gabriele showed himself most forbearing, although Ozanam sharply insulted him now and then, and even quoted Ozanam in Il Mistero. After elaborating on the crucial significance of the number nine to Dante, both within and outside a Masonic context (Dante 183), Ozanam, having established to his own satisfaction that Beatrice really lived and that she died on June 9, writes:

The month of June, which was the month of her death, was the ninth of the Jewish year. But nine is the square of three; three is the number of the divine persons. The destiny over which this number presides seems therefore to be that of a singular manifestation of the Trinity

(My translation. Cited by Rossetti, 1715).

Gabriele footnotes this by making a distinction between the “fisica” (physical) and “metafisica” (metaphysical), between “la vita attiva e la contemplativa” (the active life and the contemplative). He argues that the physical death of purely fictive Beatrice coincides with the spiritual birth of Dante, at a time when the sun, “simbolo della ragione” (symbol of reason) is at its highest elevation.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti thought that Beatrice really existed, although she might have been used by Dante to symbolize Sapienza or, as Ozanam proposed, Theology. Yet in “Ave” he appears to have followed Ozanam's lead as to numerological signification in Canto 2 of the Inferno: “Marie en trois pages revient neuf fois, toujours le nombre mystérieux, et six fois Lucie” (Dante 316). “Mary occurs nine times in three pages, always the mysterious number, and Lucia six times.” In the Canto alluded to, Beatrice tells Virgil that Mary had taken compassion on Dante and asked Lucia to go to Beatrice to entreat her to visit Virgil in Limbo in order that he might bestir himself and come to Dante's aid. Dante, at that time, is lost and terrorized by three beasts in the Dark Wood (“selva oscura”).

In “Ave,” which critics keep on identifying as the younger Rossetti's most Catholic poem, elements creep in which seem to support a nonecclesiastical, Gnostic, and even Manichaean interpretation.⁷ Mary is introduced as a “fourth” (3) person in what really amounts to a Quaternity. Also, “June” (14) as the month of the Annunciation, when the Word was made flesh, keys to the Plotinian idea of Logos, or the divine structuring “Reason” (Logos), “Which is, as God is, everywhere” (27). The angel's voice, transcending pulpits, is “silence” (30). And it is “something” “like the birth of light” that “still'd” Mary's “senses” (53-4). Here we are pitched toward the Manichaean idea of the Mother of Light whose offspring is the aeon, or archetype, Anthropos (Man). This occurs in June, the sixth month, which is simultaneously the ninth month of the Jewish year. “June's heavy breath” (14) is redolent of fleshliness; it thus may be taken as “la corteccia” (Gabriele) for “il midollo” (Gabriele) of a profoundly anti-Catholic radical spirituality. The surface is Catholic seeming, but the inner truth is a hybrid of Kabbala, gnosis, the emanational neoplatonism of Philo Judaeus, and even Manichaeanism.

To be sure, the poem may be read dialectically, with “That holier sacrament” (41) and “O Mary Virgin, full of grace!” (112) finally winning out: the Eucharist and the Catholic, human reality of actual grace as opposed to the “assumption that grace is a mere external approbation or acceptance, answering to the word ‘favor’.”⁸ (The phrase “highly favouréd” appears in line 31 of the poem; “full of grace!” ends the poem, being, so to speak, the poet's last word on the subject.) But a dialectical reading of “Ave” is rendered all but impossible or trivial unless we have some idea of precisely what it is that Rossetti means to signify by “June's heavy breath.”

Notes

1. An excellent book on the subject is William Thomas Walsh, Characters of the Inquisition (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1940). “Toward the end of the twelfth century, many thousands of Manichees had settled in the cities of Lombardy and Languedoc” (26).

2. See Robert Briffault, The Troubadours (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana U P, 1965) 92, 122, 185-86.

3. Although a Freemason, Gabriele persistently affirmed that he was “un buon cattolico” (a good Catholic). He died after receiving the last rites. See Nathan Cervo, “Gabriele Rossetti: ‘On thy Bowed Head, My Father, Fell the Night,’” The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 5.2 (1984): 81-99.

4. For the meaning of Shekina, see James L. Meagher, How Christ Said the First Mass (1906; Rockford, Illinois: Tan, 1984) 19, 22, 42.

5. Revue des deux mondes (1826). “Nous n'avons à faire qu' à l'historien sans discernement et au littérateur dépourvu du sentiment de la poésie.” “We are dealing only with an undiscerning historian and a man of letters lacking in a sense of poetry” (my translation).

6. For Gabriele's rebuttal of Fraticelli, see Ill mistero, 1618 et seqq.

7. Of the Manichees: “Besides their two gods they had two meanings for all their theological terms: one for themselves, the other for outsiders. … With singular astuteness, they said that their own sect was the true Virgin Mary, begetting spiritual sons and daughters for God. … Asked whether he believed in Christ and the Blessed Virgin, a Manichee would answer, ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ attaching his own private and particular meanings to the terms” (Walsh 58, note 1 above).

8. John Henry Newman, A Letter to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D. D. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866) 48.