SOURCE: “Three Dreams,” Books Abroad, Vol. 39, May, 1965, pp. 81-93.

[In the following essay, Stambler analyzes and interprets the three dream sequences in Purgatorio, discussing their function, roots in myth, sexual allusions, and implications.]

The three dreams of Dante's Pilgrim in Purgatory constitute a mode of exposition or narration different from anything else in the poem. The dreams are markedly set off from the rest of the poem by the kind of experience they express as well as by the breaks in consciousness that introduce them, interrupting the normal flow of the Pilgrim's progress. And yet these dream-episodes, more than any other slices of comparable size, may be used to encompass the entire Commedia—its quality, function, and meaning—just as certain simple forms of life can regenerate themselves in entirety from a section placed in the appropriate broth or, as the biologist calls it, culture medium.

The observations which follow are such an attempt to look into the dreams; my attempt will be greatly forwarded if the reader will revisit the dream-passages in Cantos 9, 19, and 27 of the Purgatorio.

A glance at three dreams suggests first that they may serve as a kind of recapitulation of three canticles of the poem. The first dream centers in a mysterious elevation, which could not have been accomplished without extraordinary aid; the great number of relatives and friends left below testifies to the specific grace and power of the Pilgrim's helper. So was the Pilgrim taken from the Dark Wood and from Hell.

The second dream tells of ugliness and vice made alluring by one's own act of will, and of the repulsion that comes with enlightenment. Here again there is necessary help from others, but not with the same sense of powerful heights that marked the first dream: rather, the cautionary words from the Lady and the swift action by Virgil resemble the naturalistic companionship and aid that characterize the process of purgation on the Mountain—a process of cooperative education.

Finally, in the figures of Leah and Rachel in the third dream we may see not so much the traditional divergence of the two sisters symbolizing action and contemplation as Dante's deliberate blurring of the difference between them. This may be his way of shadowing forth the spirits of Paradise, nearly all of whom (quite apart from the disappearance for them of the need and the possibility of making such a choice) show a significant refusal to limit or commit themselves either to pure action or to pure contemplation.

In short, the spirit of the Pilgrim released in slumber on the Mountain, besides wandering in directions for which there are no names, also wanders backward and forward to recapitulate the entire poem. Such recapitulation would not have been possible in either of the other canticles. In Hell, where there is no hope and where the name of Christ may not even be mentioned, no upward glance could have been taken. In Heaven, downward and backward glances are limited to special purposes—as in Mary's glance at the forlorn Pilgrim or in St. Peter's glance at the offenses of Boniface VIII. But in Purgatory there must be a species of memory of the sins one has been cleansed from, just as there must be hope and premonition of the heavenly goal.

The very slumbers of Purgatory are part of the uniquely realistic quality of this canticle. In neither Hell nor Paradise is there any stopping for rest, much less for slumber; these two canticles present conditions while the emphasis of the Purgatorio is on experience, change, development. The dreams reflect significant experiences and developments of the Pilgrim in an interweaving of three—perhaps four—threads: the prophetic (better, vatic); the mythic (archetypal or other); and the sexual (whether conscious or unconscious); to these may perhaps be added the personal or functional. These threads are tightly intertwined, yet we may try to follow them separately.

Ancient Dream Lore and the Vatic Element in the Three Dreams. Dante would have received his dream-lore from a number of sources: from Old Testament dreams and the exegeses of them; from Cicero and Macrobius; in the psychological-philosophical tradition, from the Aristotelian dream-theory as developed by the Arabic commentators and coming to rest in Aquinas; in the literary tradition, from Virgil, Statius, and the great array of medieval dream-literature. (See, for example, the opening of the Roman de la Rose.)

From classical theory Dante had available to him a great range of possibilities. These have been well summarized, though in another connection, by Werner Wolff in The Dream—Mirror of Conscience:

Freud used most of the theories on dream activity which had been developed since antiquity and—for the first time—united them in a system. He took over the ancient concept that the dream arises from external or internal stimuli, that its content is patterned by memories and impressions from the previous day, some of which did not rise to awareness because of greater waking impulses. He also believed that the dream is an expression of unfulfilled desires and that impulses, especially sexual ones, find their expression in dream imagery. Freud re-emphasized that the language of the dream is symbolic, transforming certain images from reality into other dream images, replacing abstract thoughts by imagery, sometimes using allegories, sometimes rebus-like combinations. All this had been formulated by the ancients.

Virgil and Statius, guides to the Pilgrim in the Commedia, were in their writings probably the major literary guides to Dante's dream-lore. The Aeneid makes structural use of twelve dreams, of various kinds and for various purposes.¹ Most of these are dreams of supernatural agency, both benevolent and malevolent, sometimes directly from a divinity and at other times through a specter or allegory contrived by a divinity. (For close parallels with Dante, see the dreams at Aeneid III. 147 sqq. and IV. 465 sqq.)

Much seems to be made in the Commedia of the fact that the three dreams come just before dawn. Medieval belief was that such a dream was sent under benevolent and truthful auspices, and that such a dream was directly rather than cryptically revelatory. The classical phrase for this belief came from Horace (Sat. i. 10. 33): Post mediam noctem, cum somnia vera. The support for this belief is somewhat thin: there are only five ancient references to it out of half a thousand loci where such a detail might possibly have been mentioned. But it remains that Dante, along with others in his day, used this aspect of a dream, presumably to stress its truth and significance.²

Most critical expositions of the dream passages in the Purgatory are concerned with the vatic aspects of the dreams; consequently a synopsis of such foreshadowings will suffice here. While the sleeping Pilgrim is being carried by St. Lucia to the threshold of Purgatory the dreaming Pilgrim is in forecast being elevated by the eagle (God? Christ? the eagle of justice of the Paradiso?) on the way to the high consistory of the saints, but the lifting power takes him no higher than the sublunary sphere of fire. The fear with which the Pilgrim abruptly awakens is an anticipation of the terror he will show at entering the fires on the Terrace of the Lustful.

In the second dream, which takes place on the Terrace of the Slothful, the Siren betokens and foreshadows the vices of the flesh, illusory and vain, which are to be encountered on the next three terraces of the Mountain. Again, a divine intercessor is needed and is provided.

The third dream is taken as foreshadowing the meeting with Matelda and with Beatrice and as betokening a relation with the Active Life and the Contemplative Life.

The vatic aspect of the dreams, though richest in lore and in commentary, is probably the least significant of all within the meaning and structure of the Commedia.

The Mythic Elements of the Three Dreams. A number of today's critics have dealt with the myths, or myth-patterns, that Dante perhaps unconsciously embodies in the structure and purpose of the Commedia. Quite another thing is Dante's highly conscious use of specific mythic stories, in such fashion that while incorporating them into the scheme of his work he is also providing his commentaries or variations on them. This is nearly the most pervasive and significant structural principle of the Commedia: Dante's selection and shaping of myths (or of historical data) are as revealing of his particular purposes, within the context of his axiomatic beliefs, as are his choices of the exemplary persons, living or dead, actual or fictional, that constitute his poemae personae.

Each of the three dreams is built about a myth—the first two are Greek, the third is Judaeo-Christian. The first myth, that of Ganymede, is concerned with translation by divine selection from a lower, workaday region to a supernal realm of activity. (The episode from Achilles's career mentioned in this first dream easily permits an analogous interpretation—even to the ambiguity of values apparent in the higher, translated function: he is taken to become the hero of the Trojan War and to meet his death.) The second dream is most clearly a reshaping of existent myth: here, as in a hundred similar instances, it is more to the point to ask why Dante changed or invented a myth than to hunt for the line that he might possibly have misread in order to arrive at his concept. The third dream, concerned with Leah and Rachel, is one of the few great examples of a pagan myth transposed in antiquity into the Judaeo-Christian ambiance. The ancient Greek world had the parallel figures of Zethus and Amphion, while from the New Testament were derived the figures of Martha and Mary. This parable, or myth, or actuality of the need to choose between action and contemplation is so deep in the ancient and medieval worlds, and so essential in the theme of the Commedia, that it merits detailed examination after a brief look at the first two dreams.

Ganymede, the only favorite of Zeus to attain Olympus, provoked a complex history of interpretations, summarized by Erwin Panofsky in Studies in Iconology (Harper Torchbooks edition, pp. 213-216):

In the fourth century B. C. we find already two opposite conceptions: while Plato believed the myth of Ganymede to have been invented by the Cretans in order to justify amorous relations between men and boys or adolescents (Laws I, 636c), Xenophon explained it as a moral allegory denoting the superiority of the mind in comparison with the body; according to him the very name of Ganymede, supposedly derived from Greek, γάνυsθαι (to enjoy) and μήδεα (intelligence), would bear witness to the fact that intellectual, not physical advantages win the affection of the gods and assure immortality (Symposium VIII, 30).

As a cautionary example I may here cite Landino, who, in his commentary on Purg. 9. 19 sqq., exemplifies the Renaissance handling of allegorical interpretation. Ganymede, he says, signifies the human mind beloved by Jove, that is, the Supreme Being. Ganymede's companions represent the other faculties of the soul, such as the vegetative and the sensitive. “Jove, perceiving that the Mind is in the forest—that is, remote from mortal things—by means of the eagle transports it to Heaven. Hence it leaves behind its companions, that is, the vegetative and sensitive faculties; and thus withdrawn or, as Plato says, divorced from the body, it is thoroughly absorbed in contemplation of the secrets of Heaven.” It is difficult to believe that this style of interpretation, which has its modern analogues, uses the poem for anything more than a series of springboards for the interpreter's rhetorical fancies.

For Dante the point of the Pilgrim as a second Ganymede seems to lie in the place and time of election. Few single lines in the Commedia better exhibit Dante's wilful mixture of pagan and Christian elements than that speaking of Ganymede

quando fu ratto al sommo consistoro.

But this line serves chiefly to focus attention on curious details of this scene. The Pilgrim, he says, “seemed to be in that place where his own people were abandoned by Ganymede.” Why there, if not, as the upshot shows, waiting for the same lightning to strike twice? And why the peculiar direction of the syntax in “abbandonati … da Ganimede” if not to emphasize the self-proffering, even self-election, by Ganymede and consequently by the Pilgrim? And we are to remember that Ganymede was a son of Tros, eponymous founder of Troy and ancestor of the royal family of Troy. Hence there is a suggestion linking the Pilgrim with Aeneas, in a great chain of associations particularly with Inferno 2.32. Similarly, the likening to Achilles which comes after the awakening from the dream links the Pilgrim to the hero on whose emotions and choices turns the whole structure of the Iliad.

This theme of will and choice is continued into the second dream, but now carried to the extremes of wilfulness and solipsism. The language of 19.10-13 is interesting here:

Io la mirava; e come ’l sol conforta
          le fredde membra che la notte aggrava,
          così lo sguardo mio le facea scorta
la lingua …

The function of the dreaming Pilgrim's eyes is like that of God's vivifying sun: the “Io la mirava” becomes comparable to “Let there be light” when we recall the animating power of the sun in Purgatory; to ensure that we do recall, Dante frames the entire second dream in two passages explicitly reminding us not only of the power of the sun (the mirror of God's light) but also of the opposing power of the forces of cold and darkness (at 19.1-3 and 19.37-39).

The Lady santa e presta who puts the Siren to confusion presents a small but important problem. It seems clear that it is not Saint Lucia, whom Virgil would have recognized and named from the episode of the first dream; probably, too, if he had seen her before, he would not have displayed such unseemly curiosity about her as to approach the Siren

con li occhi fitti pur in quella onesta.

An appearance of Beatrice at this point would not merely be a dramatic error but would surely have met with a greater response from the Pilgrim. Who then, of Dante's Three Ladies, can she be but Mary? For whom would the epithets santa e presta be more precisely defining? Who else would have had the requisite alertness and freedom of movement? And if onesta be taken in its sense of “chaste,” who better than Mary to warrant this term marking her off from the Siren? If it be objected that this is too direct an intervention, too much unlike Mary's method of delegating a similar task to Lucia and Beatrice at the opening of the Commedia, the answer must be not only that the need for haste is much greater here but also that the fantasy-context of the dream permits this to be the only place in the poem to carry Mary herself so far down from her place in the high consistory (and thereby complete the roster of the Three Ladies come to aid the Pilgrim directly in his journey through Hell and Purgatory). Thus, after the first dream has shown the Pilgrim carried aloft by God (or by Christ, as the eagle-component of the griffon), the second dream may show him needing and getting the ready eye and help of the Virgin Mary.

That the third dream in Purgatory is concerned with two figures traditionally symbolizing Action and Contemplation is everywhere seen and said. But precisely how this dream is concerned with Action and Contemplation is rarely stated with either comfort or clarity, although most glosses on this episode state rather firmly that the two women of the dream foreshadow Matelda and Beatrice of the Earthly Paradise. There are many serious objections even to this interpretation, of which one or two may suffice. The essence of the story of Leah and Rachel is the choice of Jacob, choice whether free or limited; and the meaning of the parable is the distinction, and the need to choose, between the active life and the contemplative life. Is there any element at all, let alone an essence, of choice for the Pilgrim between Matelda and Beatrice? Another form of the parabolic meaning would have the active life, still summed up in Matelda, equated with the career of the spirits in Purgatory, while the contemplative life, represented in Beatrice, is that of the spirits' direct knowledge of God in Paradise. This interpretation, too, adds little that is helpful in understanding either the dream or Matelda and Beatrice.

No, I believe that the use to which Dante puts Leah and Rachel is one of the most significant illustrations of his process of manipulating myth to his own ends; to take these figures in their traditional sense is to start becoming tangled in a web of awkward rationalization, a web from which one must early extricate himself. What then is the meaning, in this dream, of the myth of choice between Action and Contemplation?

The need to choose between the active and the contemplative life is one of the many things from the past that today bear a certain air of unreality. But for many centuries a great amount of serious philosophical energy went, directly or indirectly, into debating this question. It is the question that, unspoken, lies behind most of the later Platonic dialogues and, for instance, determines the great change in tone and purpose between the Republic and the Laws. Again unspoken, this question lies behind Aristotle's socio-political thinking, turning his magnanimous man of the Ethics into a non-political creature who establishes statues, highways, and foundations, and turning the treatise on Poetics into a prescription for civic emotion- and thought-control. That is to say, the concept of the contemplative life evolved as an unhappy example of turning a necessity into a virtue.

Epicurean and Stoic, disjunct as they are in most concerns of philosophy, are in accord on the concept and advisability of the contemplative life—the bios theoretikos. For the Epicurean the components of the bios theoretikos are aponia and ataraxia—freedom from toil (ponos) and freedom from passion (tarache). Ponos is a disordering of the body, tarache a disordering of the mind. Epicurean contemplation therefore involved the renunciation of fame and of the crowd of men; through aponia-ataraxia, the refraining from political activity; a culmination in rest and leisure, with a repudiation of society and family.

Stoicism used somewhat different terms to arrive at the same goal. The Stoic comes ultimately to live in conformity with nature by being indifferent to such external things as honors, fame, praise, life, and death. The ideals were autarkeia and apatheia. Seneca provided the inevitable conclusion to this process of self-ruling and not-feeling by justifying and advocating suicide for the contemplative man.

We may pause here to note that anything farther from Dante's ideals than these concepts of the bios theoretikos could not be found; at best these concepts bear a curious resemblance to Aquinas's notions of acedie.

The broad concept of the contemplative man flowed into Christianity by a number of channels among which we may name only two, themselves interconnected—monasticism, with its Eastern sources and analogues, and the near-futility of Christian man as political man, at least until the time of Constantine. Much of this history is directly or indirectly reflected in the City of God; Augustine's counterpoising of the City of God and the City of Man was the most significant single concept (outside of those derived from Scripture) in forming the life-patterns as well as the theology of the Middle Ages, and its effects are still with us. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, probably the most influential single work towards the ideal of contemplation, ironically rounds out the history begun by Plato: the Consolation was written, after a long and successful life of political activity, while Boethius was in jail awaiting execution on a false charge of treason believed by the emperor to whom he had devoted his life.

We must also see the Contemplative Life in the involvement it acquired with mysticism. This, too, probably took its starting point from Plato, in what was made by later writers of the Platonic Ladder, as discoverable in the Symposium or, better, the Theatetus. For the Neoplatonist, contemplation leads to vision and then rises above sensible things to an identity of the act of contemplation with the thing contemplated, to an immediate beholding of the Idea of Good and the Idea of Ideas. In this way, the theory and practice of contemplation brought it to merge with the mystical experience in Christianity.

There can be no question of Dante's admiration and veneration for the great mystics, for St. Bonaventura, for Hugh and Richard of St. Victor. But there is little question, also, of two other things: that apart from the most general patterns of resemblance there is little mysticism in the Commedia, and that the period of Christian thought which most directly impinged on Dante—the generation or two before him—had been a growth away from mysticism. Aquinas can say, for example, in the de virtutibus cardinalibus, that “the contemplative life is superhuman,” or (at S. T. I, qu. 12, 3 ad 3): “What is seen in visions of the imagination is not God's essence but images which represent him after a fashion of figures, as do the metaphorical figures in Holy Writ.”

Let us now apply these considerations to the third dream. It is notable, in the first place, that Jacob or a Jacob-figure is missing from the dream. Such an argument, by negative evidence, would ordinarily be worth little, but when we remember the centrality of the dreamer in the first two dreams we may be impressed by the absence in this dream of any agent to choose between the two sisters. When we also remember the prominence of will, election, selection in the first two dreams we are struck by the absence of such elements in the third dream—in a myth-pattern of which the essence had always been the need for making a choice, and in a version of the myth in which the choice is made by a third person rather than by the Martha or the Mary concerned. We might also guess at Dante's ironic reasons for using Leah-Rachel rather than Zethus-Amphion (to be consistent with the Greek myths used in the other two dreams) or Martha-Mary (to use a purely Christian parable): Jacob chose Rachel and received Leah.³

What this dream of Leah portends, then, is not choice of any sort but the freedom which lies beyond the need for choice, the freedom of Paradise—a freedom not limited or dictated by ignorance, inadequacy, or external arbitrary power. Coming before this condition of Paradise is the preparatory condition, the final educational exercises, of the Earthly Paradise—where the coexistence and mutual dependence of action and contemplation are as emphatically shown as anywhere in the Heavenly Paradise.⁴ But the immediate consequent of the dream parabolically liberating the Pilgrim from any separation between the active and the contemplative life is in the words of Virgil—the last he speaks in the poem—which close the canto of the dream:

“… io te sovra te corono e mitrio.”

There seems little doubt that these words signal the cursus complectus fulfilled in the Pilgrim's journey up the Mountain: not, of course, by Dante the man but by the Pilgrim who has, however, rapidly gone through all the purgatorial processes. Such a one, purified of all the tendencies which make man unable to live at peace with himself or with his neighbor, has no further need of crown and miter, the disciplinary powers delegated by God to the secular and spiritual rulers of man in earthly society. [Whether or not this is Joachist theology, or sociology, is another question and not relevant here.]

The Sexual Elements in the Three Dreams. Whatever we choose to make of the allegory of Dante's love for Beatrice, as portrayed in the Commedia, we can have little choice about the literal sense of that love. Beatrice herself, as she indicates at Purg. 31.28-30 and 49-54, is insistent that his love for her was solidly founded on her pre-eminent physical beauty. In many ways the stil nuovists and Dante himself may have moved far from the love poets of Provence and Sicily but not in the firm link between physical and spiritual beauty, between desire of the body of a beautiful woman and love of her soul or of what her soul represented. In great measure the purification and clarification of the Pilgrim's soul as he experiences the processes of the purgatorial terraces may be seen as a preparation to meet, and for the first time truly value, Beatrice. It would have been a curious excision of part of the human capability had this process of maturation included no aspect of the sexual component of man. Quite the contrary, although through a poetic device amounting almost to a necessity the sexual elements of the Pilgrim's growth abound in the dreams and are almost absent from the other portions of the Purgatorio.

Both context and content then of the three dreams are laden with sexual allusions and implications of every kind. These may be direct references, as in the catalogue serving as prelude to the first dream: “the concubine of ancient Tithonus, come forth from the arms of her sweet lover.” Could Dante, one might ask, not have found some other mythological reference to denote the time? He does, a moment later, in telling of the hour when the sad swallow sings her song recalling the involved sexual relations of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela.

But the more significant sexual references are those given indirectly or additively. It might be possible to mention this episode in Achilles's career without summoning up a sexual context for the story, but it becomes difficult to do so in such proximity to Ganymede. Having decided on a figure of seizure and transposition to express the idea of ascension and change of state, Dante had a great array of legendary or actual kidnappings to choose from. The two legends he did select are from the classical realm of perverse sexuality: Ganymede being snatched to Olympus to become the homosexual love and servant of Zeus; Achilles snatched by his mother [to save him from war and death] and taken to live among women as a transvestite. Dante does not mention the sexual aspects of either myth, but his selection and juxtaposition of these two kidnappings make the stories interlock in the reader's mind and produce these significant sexual implications of both.

The fire of this dream is clearly to be associated with the only other fire in Purgatory—that which burns away lusts, perverse or excessive, on the last terrace of the Mountain, as the last prerequisite to entering the Earthly Paradise. But why does the eagle [who has, like lightning, descended from his natural home] burn with the Pilgrim—parea che ella e io ardesse—in the fire that breaks the slumber of the dreamer? [And it is this breaking of slumber that serves as the link with young Achilles.] The simple explanation of the burning of the eagle lies of course in the myth itself: Zeus the eagle burns with love even more than does Ganymede. This mutual burning might of course be extensible into the allegorical interpretations, but, especially on the basis of the cautious parea—“it seemed”—we might also guess that the dreamer is projecting his own feelings to the eagle.

The Siren of the second dream is a three-part song form of sex. First she is the complete antithesis of all that arouses sexual desire; then, when she has been turned into a figure of beauty by the dreamer's gaze,⁵ she is by her own account the sweet one who turned faithful Ulysses from his course; finally she reverts to the revolting anti-sexual creature she had first been. The Siren is one of the most explicit ancient images of sexual desire within an artistic framework; Dante uses this image to show that her irresistible desirability is a wilful illusion created by the artist himself. There may well be here a confession of guilt [such as occurs in many forms throughout the Inferno and Purgatorio], of having thus erred in some of his early poetry [pietra and pargoletta] until set on a better path by Virgil and the Lady.

The third dream shows us two charming allegorical figures. Yet we must remember that before Leah and Rachel became a choice of careers to be embraced they were two women. The symbolic quality of them would not have come into being had not Jacob found one [and eventually both] of them sexually attractive. Within the dream Dante might have presented the two women in any one of a great choice of situations: he chose a situation involving feminine beauty and the self-enjoyment of it.

A number of curious details remain in the third dream. Again the time of morning is presented in an image associated with sex: “At the hour when … Cytherea who seems always burning with the fire of love. …” Yet, by eliminating any figure who could serve as a Jacob [the dreamer-Pilgrim fills this bill only remotely], Dante seems to be diminishing the element of sexual choice and increasing the significance of the mirror. The imagery associated with the mirror is ancient, extensive, and ambiguous—and highly significant for poetry as well as for theology. Here I can only note that one, especially under the conditions of ancient and medieval technology, saw darkly in a mirror, and that Aquinas said that “seeing a thing in a mirror is like seeing cause through effect.” Both Leah and Rachel then, may be, as Diotima might say, the imperfectly seen forms of love that lead up to the better and best.

The forms of love in all three dreams are imperfect and inadequate, though in different ways, and seem to be arranged in a contrived sequence. From the polymorphous and perverse infantile sexuality of the first dream we proceed to the coarsely fantastic but recognizably realistic, faute de mieux, sex-dream of, say, an adolescent youth, and finally move to a cool and aesthetic context for sex but perhaps suggesting sexual divagations of an age beyond desire.⁶

The Personal and Functional Level of Meaning. A number of significant details within the dreams are best described as realistic or technical aspects of the three episodes. Perhaps this is a double category: some of these details reveal the quality, often idiosyncratic, of the Pilgrim; others seem to be mechanical details presented for the sake of verisimilitude. In both these groups, however, it is the personality of the Pilgrim, or of his function in the poem, that suggests or dominates such a detail.

The closing lines of Canto 18 may supply the motif for this category: they simultaneously define the process by which a dream may come into being and stress the will of the human agent involved.

           … novo pensiero dentro a me si mise,
del qual più altri nacquero e diversi;
          e tanto d’uno in altra vaneggiai,
          che li occhi per vaghezza ricopersi,
e ’l pensamento in sogno trasmutai.

A new thought, which produces others—a rambling among these until thought becomes dream. But note the stress, and the reinforcement through rhyme, on vaneggiai—I rambled—and trasmutai—I changed thinking into dream—, a stress particularly notable since the process began idly or passively but was made active by this rambler.

Of this same kind are lines 16-18 of Canto 9:

… che la mente nostra, peregrina
più dalla carne e men da’ pensier presa,
alle sue vision quasi è divina …

It is tempting to see these lines as describing the essentially visionary and contemplative method of the entire Commedia [especially after correlating them with Par. 33.36 and 142], but it is a salutary exercise to hold them down to the context not only of a dream but of the particular dream which is to follow. John of Salisbury [at Policraticus II, 4] had stated a similar, somewhat Gnostic or Pythagorean, thesis about what happens in dreams: “It comes about that the soul is lifted up above contact with the body that it may turn more freely upon itself and contemplate the truth.”

The three dreams vary in realism, in respect to the suddenness or gradualness with which each begins, but they are alike in the seeming lack of preparation for the particular set of events or facts presented in each. There is also a variable amount of dream-realism in the internal logic of the dream-sequence itself and in the postlude to each dream. A few instances of each of these must suffice.

For a preparatory passage we may look at Canto 27.70-93. Here, before the last dream, the Pilgrim and his companions are caught by the descent of the sun while they are on the steps leading to the last terrace. This very stress on the steps, recalling the stepwise movement in Purgatory, sets this dream-scene into marked contrast with the other two, especially with the scene of the Terrace of the Slothful for the second dream.

The impatience of the Pilgrim to get on is conveyed in the image of the next few lines comparing the three travelers to lively goats. But much more is said in this image. The goats, active and wanton before being fed, are then content to lie quiet—mildly chewing the cud. Is this not an emblem of the Active and the Contemplative Life? And if it is a ludicrous, or even degrading emblem, by whose will is it so? Another detail here may be underlining this curious image. The goats lie silent in the shade while the sun is burning. That is fine, and even intelligent, for goats; but are we here suddenly to forget the symbolism of the sun as the power to vivify and not to somnify? Dante concludes this chain of images in line 91, where he is not [as at 18.145] “thinking” but now “ruminating.” This whole image of the ruminating goats is certainly not a prepossessing introduction to a [supposed] praise of contemplation as a way of life. This might also be the place to point out that Dante's words for “action” and “contemplation,” at 27.108, are not only the simplest possible terms—vedere and ovrare—but are better applicable to the work of the shepherds and the goats than to that of the two sisters, even though it is Leah who uses these terms.

The internal mechanism of the second dream marks it off from the others. Here the Lady and Virgil are presented as au courant with the episodes of the dream and even to intervene in it without destroying its dream-quality. This mixture of perspectives, if that is the name for what Dante is doing here, remains curiously unlike any antecedent dream tradition and must finally be explained in terms of Dante's purposes rather than of his sources. Aquinas's discussion of the agent intellect may throw a little light on what Dante is doing here [cf. S. T., I, qu. 79, especially articles 4, 10, 12, and 13]. Aquinas's reasoning is too tight and complex even for abridgment; but his philosophic description of the operation of the agent intellect seems not inconsistent with the poetic persona tentatively identified above as the Virgin Mary [or an equivalent activity proper to each person].

This second dream also has an unusually long aftermath or coda, in the deep thoughtfulness or even fear felt by the Pilgrim after it is over. Virgil's explanation of what has happened is, like many of his in the Purgatorio, solicitous but neither clear nor helpful. When he says, “You saw how man is freed from that ancient witch,” one wonders how the cure in the dream, by the Lady and Virgil, is to be used prescriptively by others. There is even an ironic echo of Virgil's consoling words: Let this explanation suffice, he says, and strike your heels on the ground—i.e., get on briskly to what comes next, with the suggestion that good healthful exercise is the best cure or preventive for such unwholesome dreams as that about the Siren. Ten lines later, at 19.70, we encounter the next group of penitents; they are lying face down, unable even to touch their heels to the ground.

Perhaps the most important clue to the whole dream-sequence comes at Purg. 9.10, in the prelude to the first dream:

… io, che meco avea di quel d’Adamo …

Dante is using this line ostensibly to explain the Pilgrim's weariness and forthcoming slumber, but we are bound to get more than that from Adam. We recall Adam also for his sin and perfectibility, for freely choosing the worse path but capable of redemption. A question remains about the meco: why “with me” rather than “in me”? (The answer is not, of course, the demands of rhythm.] Is Dante thereby suggesting that the Adam with him, the Adam of weariness and other fallibilities, is accompaniment rather than essence?

The Fourfold Method of Allegory. Aquinas's multitude of references to allegory and the fourfold system of reading reveal a certain unease with the questions they bring up, including that of the distinction he utilizes between the allegory of poets and the allegory of theologians—a distinction quite misleading without its context.

To begin with, he greatly preferred the term “spiritual sense” to “allegorical.” For the spiritual sense he finds a reason but only a limited utility. “The purpose of the spiritual sense is twofold: first, to help right conduct; second, to help right belief” (Questiones Quodlibetales, qu. vi, art. 14). But the spiritual sense is not another, more profound reading of the literal sense; rather, it is an ornamental duplication of another passage: “The spiritual sense brings nothing to faith which is not elsewhere clearly conveyed by the literal sense” (S. T. Ia, i, 10 ad 1).

It should be clear that Aquinas is speaking of “literal” and “spiritual” only as applied to the Holy Scriptures—in which the things or events are symbols by virtue of their very existence “since the true author of Scripture (as of reality) is God, Who alone is able to make real things symbols of other real things.” “To symbolize anything by words or by feigned likenesses designed as symbols can not produce anything but the literal sense. From this it follows that in no works made by human industry can there be, properly speaking, anything but the literal sense; but only in the Scriptures, of which the Holy Spirit is the author and man but the instrument [is there anything beyond the literal sense].” But even within Scripture this is not consistently so: the parables of the New Testament and the Old, the narrative of which is invented for the sake of the figured meaning; the prophecies; the visions and symbolic dreams in the Bible—all these are not true allegory since their figurative meaning is the sensus metaphoricus seu parabolicus per similitudines fictas, the same kind of figurative meaning that is to be found in the so-called allegories of the poets. (Condensed from Questiones Quodlibetales qu. vii, articles 14, 15, 16.)

Two more citations are needed to explain Aquinas's limitation of human works to the literal sense; these probably define his notion of secular poetry more accurately than his reluctant use of the phrase “allegory of poets.” “History, etiology, and analogy are all grouped under the literal sense … ; and allegory alone comes under the spiritual sense” (S. T. Ia, i 10 ad 2). “The metaphorical sense is contained in the literal sense, for words bear imaginative suggestions as well as their plain and proximate sense. The literal sense of a figurative phrase is not the figure of speech itself, but what it symbolizes; for instance, when speaking of God's arm the Bible literally means He wields power, not that He has a bodily member” (S. T. Ia, i 10 ad 3).

Besides the distinctions Aquinas is explicitly making, between divine and human works, between the Holy Scriptures and all other writings, there are others buried in his sentences: a fundamental difference between reading allegorically and writing allegorically; an allegory hidden in the nature of things, and an allegory that is contrived or a metaphorical ornament. These distinctions—tensions might be the better word—reflect the complex history of the concerns of allegory.

Toward the end of the sixth century b.c. there appeared in Greece a strong opposition to the immoral theology of Homer and Hesiod; at the same time there began to be elaborate “allegorical” readings of the two poets, by Theagenes of Rhegium and a host of disciples.⁷ To defend Homer, Theagenes found both physical (meteorological) and moral allegory in the persons and episodes of the poem. The word “allegory” seems not to have come into use until the time of Plutarch; for six centuries the activity was conducted under the name of [unóvoia] The term [unóvoia] expressed a great range of significations: from the simplest relation between a thing perceived and the idea that might be conjectured from that perception, all the way to the concealed significations that might lie within poetic narration or description or within philosophical and religious myths.

Another tradition of allegory, stemming from Pythagoras, was connected with the Eleusinian mysteries and Orphism. This is a double allegory, of things as well as of words—an allegory of the relation, or difference, between the world of hidden and invisible reality and the world of appearances; but also the further allegory involved in the need to speak of sacred things with different degrees of indirectness to outsiders and with different degrees to the initiate. The final developments of Greek allegorical theory and practice—combining all the traditions just mentioned—are to be found in Plutarch, certain Stoic philosophers, and such eclectic- or neo-Platonists as Maximus of Tyre and Plotinus.

In the great meeting-ground of Alexandria in the two centuries before Christ, when Jewish Scriptures confronted Greek myth and philosophy, the development of Old Testament allegorical readings proceeded apace. Philo of Alexandria brought the technique to its high point, detailing elaborate correspondences between Greek myth and Biblical history, between Greek philosophy and Old Testament spiritual allegory. His precise classifications served as models for most of his successors.

But fitting the old stories into a new age, as Jew and Greek had to do, was less complex than the early Christian task in the great centuries of syncretism, of peoples as well as of ideas and histories; the Christian theologian had to uncover or specify the new dispensation from God while not abandoning the old—a task that was neither clear nor simple until it had been accomplished by the highest efforts of heart and mind from a millennium of theologians.

The device of “another reading” not merely of the text but of the very event within the text proved to be the key to unlocking the Old Testament as shadow of the substance of the New. But by the time of Bonaventure and Bernard, of Dominic and Thomas, this task had been accomplished: the emotional, philosophical, and even the argumentative purposes had long since been fulfilled. Each of these four men was able to add his bit to the great structure of allegorical interpretations, in much more than a mood of pious ingenuity but considerably less than the grand architectonics of, say, Augustine.

Dante's relation to the fourfold system is anything but simple. In the Convivio, where he was writing theory and not poetry, he seems content with the Aquinian descriptions—though perhaps he goes fondly beyond Aquinas in both adjective and noun of his phrase for the literal sense, una bella menzogna. In this phrase, of the literary models available to him, he seems closer to those near him in time: his phrase better suits the Roman de la Rose or even the Anticlaudianus of Alain de Lille than the Psychomachia of Prudentius or Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. The literary thought of Dante's day can perhaps be summarized as believing that the narrative or literal substance of a poem could be one of three kinds: historically true, possibly or probably true, untrue (or, sometimes, marvellous). Dante's bella menzogna—“beautiful deception” or “lie”—might come closest to this third variety.

In the letter to Can Grande, Dante is not as clear on allegory as we might wish him to be. He first speaks of allegory in a broad sense (giving us two readings of a text) and then in a narrow sense (giving us four readings of the same text). Finally he speaks of the ten modes of writing employed in the poem. The broad and narrow “allegory” probably come from Aquinas; the ten modes at first seem to have nothing to do with allegory until we see the similarity between this list and that of Charisius and other grammarians.

The medieval schoolboy had a mnemonic to keep him straight on the allegorical (or spiritual) meanings of a sacred text:

Littera gesta docet,
Quid credas allegoria,
Moralis quid agas,
Quo tendas anagogia.

Dante's Pilgrim in the Commedia has an essential quality of Everyman, but not, I submit, in terms of this mnemonic or of the allegorical system behind it—at least as that system is generally taken or applied to the Commedia. Nor is Dante's journey a figural pattern; it is a unique poetic fiction, theologically impossible qua journey—no soul, for instance, journeys through Hell.

Perhaps now, however, we are prepared to apply the mnemonic in a slightly different way—in the way suggested by Aquinas's difinition of the literal sense of a secular poem. What we must dwell upon at every level of the allegory in the Commedia is nothing other than what happens to the Pilgrim. Dante himself says as much, in the letter to Can Grande, by what he says of the literal sense of his poem.

In terms, then, of what happens to the Pilgrim the anagogic sense—“whither you are headed”—comes quite close to the vatic significance I have discussed for the dreams. Nor does this vatic significance exist for the dreams only; rather, it constitutes the patterned structure of the entire poem—the structure of his Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, by being Dante's device for embracing the entire human capability within one clear schema, compels the reader to be conscious of more than the segment of the poem he is then traversing.

The moral sense of the poem—“what you should do”—is thereby connected with such universal matters of choice and rectifications of choice (culminating in a condition where no choice is possible or necessary) as are discussed above in connection with the mythic interpretations of the dreams.

The allegorical sense—“what you should believe”—is instigator and goal, first and final cause, of both the anagogic and the moral senses; this perhaps also explains why Dante uses “allegory” both narrowly and broadly. It is what you believe that starts you off in any given episode or adventure of life; your beliefs determine your choices at any crossroads of possibilities (moral) as well as the direction in which you are generally headed (anagoge). In turn, your beliefs are refined and, if necessary, corrected by your own experience—so that they may be considerably different at the end of the process from what they had been to start out with.

The narrow allegorical sense has to do with the substratum of habit (as defined by Aristotle and Aquinas) that alone makes belief operational. It comes close to the intuitional or unconscious element in man but is conceived as being always under his own observation and always subject to his own correction. I have discussed this allegorical sense in terms of the sexual aspects of the dreams because so it appears in these portions of the Commedia; outside the dreams this sense of the poem appears in other fashions. Perhaps the sequence of the dreams most reveals this sense, in what might be called a theme of diminishing difference (a Freudian critic might call it a motif of the released ego). In the first dream there are stressed motifs of the elect, of ascension and metamorphosis—of the one who is increasingly to be distinguished from the many. The second dream (coming, we must remember, after a number of enlightening and digested experiences of the Pilgrim) leaves the many behind but presents the power of the one in magnified form—the one who, as observer and artist, is creator and cause of metamorphosis. This “one” is more active than the smugly passive “one” of the first dream, but the unhealth of the artist who is his own audience—who has left the many outside—could not be more strongly presented. In the third dream the “one” has almost vanished; he is there only as observer and listener—but as actor, as wilful chooser, he has disappeared. The very point of this last dream may be the extinction of the ancient difference between the Contemplative Man and the Active Man—roughly equivalent to the One and the Many.

This sense of the allegorical, fulfilled mutatis mutandis in the parts of the poem outside the dreams, is perhaps the central sense of the Commedia. It assumes that each man receives the truths revealed, accepted, or taught in his day. But what he is willing or able to use of these truths is quite another thing. Pattern, the wisdom of the ages or even of the previous generation, insight into the future gained from the past—all these are, so to speak, irrelevant to any man until he has made them his own through experience—experience actual, emotional, imagined, or fictional. And it is all these modes (excepting the directly actual) that the Commedia sets out to convey, in their necessary union with each other and in Dante's concept of their relationships.

These modes, and their union, are the substance of the undertaking for the modern Dante critic. He must remember that for the Middle Ages allegory was not a learned or mechanical mode of complicating simple stories but was rather a necessary and welcome part of man's obligation to find God's rational order in the seeming chaos of the world. Allegory discovered patterns in the past to clarify the present or throw light on the future; allegory floated free between the particular and the universal.

But today's critic has to deal with today's particulars; furthermore, the seriousness of a poem no longer needs endorsement by suggesting similitude to Holy Writ. I am not suggesting that the fourfold method of interpreting the Commedia be scrapped; it has yielded invaluable insights into the poem and, handled today without sanctimony or pretentiousness or a semi-puzzled lip-service, can certainly yield many more. But I am suggesting that we not try to give more veneration or utility to this system than it received from Aquinas or Dante. I am also suggesting that to concentrate on, say, a figural or a mythic or a quasi-theological interpretation is only to establish a clique of new schoolmen: however sturdy each such structure of interpretation may prove in itself it can only precariously support the total plan and weight of Dante's gigantic poem.

Notes

1. A good account of ancient dream lore as treated by philosophers is in Bernhard Büchsenschütz, Traum und Traumdeutung im Alterthum; Berlin. 1868. See also Aristotle's De Somniis and De Divinatione per Somniis. For the popular tradition see the Oneirocriticon of Artemidorus.

2. The use of dreams in Latin epic and dramatic poetry is studied in J. B. Stearns, Studies of the dream as a technical device in Latin epic and drama, Lancaster. 1927; and in H. R. Steiner, Der Traum in der Aeneis, Bern. 1952. Charles Speroni's article on “Dante's Prophetic Morning Dreams” (Studies in Philology XLV, 50-59) supplies a good summary: The Divine Comedy has seven allusions to morning-dreams - Inferno 26. 7-9; 33. 26-27, 37-39, 43-45; Purgatorio 9. 13-19; 19. 1-7; and 27. 91-98, in addition to a reference in the first sonnet of the Vita Nuova and the material discussed in Convivio II, 9. Artemidorus does not mention morning-dreams, but Moschus, Horace, Ovid, Philostratus the Elder, and Tertullian do.

3. The reasoning here might be thus outlined. (1) There must be differences, e.g., among women, to make the fact of choice meaningful. (2) Similarly, there must be the possibility of implementing a choice. (3) Jacob, in the story, was not capable of (2). (4) Dante, in his treatment of the story, does his best to destroy (1). Dante's handling of this story, then, is one of compound ironies. Finally, we should remember that in the paradisiac condition there is no giving or taking in marriage.

4. For a discussion of these aspects of the third dream as they are related to the events and persons of the Earthly Paradise, see my Dante's Other World (New York. 1957), pp. 236-237, 239-242 and note 11, p. 356. On the question of the process and results of purgation for the Pilgrim, ibid., passim but especially chapters 5 and 12 and pp. 298-301.

5. In the incendio imaginato of Purg. 9.32 there is an important link with the first dream. Two citations from Aquinas are significant here. The first is on the relation between concupiscence and the will: “I answer that, Concupiscence does not cause involuntariness, but, on the contrary, makes something to be voluntary. … Concupiscence inclines the will to desire the object of concupiscence … (yet) the will can resist the passion” (S. T. I-II, xi, qu. 6, art. 7). The second is on the connection between the concupiscible and the irascible, a link shown in the structure of the dream and the interruption of it by the Lady and Virgil: “I answer that, the sensitive appetite is one generic power, and is called sensuality but it is divided into two powers, which are species of the sensitive appetite—the irascible and the concupiscible. … Anger rises from sadness, and having wrought vengeance terminates in joy” (S. T. I-II, qu. 81, art. 2; ed. by Pegis).

   I might add here that the Siren's statements, or boasts, about Ulysses nearly entitle her to be called una bella menzogna.

6. The only other locus in the Commedia where sexual images and allusions crowd together in such abundance is in the opening scene in the Earthly Paradise. This scene with Matelda is certainly connected with the dreams, and particularly with the third dream. See the references to the Earthly Paradise in n. 5.

7. An excellent history of this subject is in Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie. Aubier (Editions Montaigne). 1958.