[In the following essay, Gilson explores the nature and origin of the shades—the characters in Hell, Purgatory, and the lower circles of Paradise—and the motivation behind Dante's efforts to scientifically justify them.]

The art of Dante is so imperious and compelling that, as with Michael Angelo's and Beethoven's, when its spell has taken hold of us, the artist can make us believe what he pleases. I know from personal experience that one can read the Divine Comedy for many years without wondering about the nature and origin of the beings called by Dante ombre and by us shades. Yet the Sacred Poem is full of such beings. Shades make up the bulk of the population in hell and purgatory and we take them for granted; but as soon as we begin to ask questions about their nature, difficulties make themselves felt.

A poet highly conscious of his own art, Dante wondered about the nature of these poetic beings; and speaking as a poet with intense speculative interests, he asked himself how such beings could be conceived.

The question offered itself to his mind (at least, according to his own poetic convention, and perhaps too in historical reality) in the Purgatorio III, 16-45. Dante and Virgil are walking with the setting sun behind them. Suddenly Dante realizes that while his body casts a shadow before him, Virgil's shade does not. For one moment Dante wonders whether Virgil has deserted him. But no, the shade of Virgil is still with him; but a shade is not a body. Virgil's true body, the one that used to cast a shadow, is not in Purgatory; it now lies buried in Naples. “That no shadow falls in front of me,” says Virgil, “is in no wise more surprising than that light beams do not interfere with one another in the skies.” Virgil is here replying to a question which Dante had not asked, and which might well have been let pass. But Virgil went on: “The Power who does not intend to unveil to us his doings, makes such bodies susceptible to sufferings caused by heat and cold. That man is insane who hopes by reason to follow to its end the infinite road taken by one substance in three persons. O men, content yourselves with knowing that it is so, for if you were able to know all, there would have been no need for Mary to conceive. You have seen, vainly thirsting for knowledge like this, men for whom such knowledge would have satisfied the very longing now given them as their eternal sorrow. I speak of Aristotle and of Plato, and of many others.” Whereupon, bending his brow, Virgil ceased to speak and remained troubled.

Dante could just as well have asked the question in his Inferno, but he did not. Moreover, it is remarkable that, having first asked it in the third book of the Purgatorio, he seems to have lost sight of it for over twenty cantos, for he does not take it up again until the twenty fifth canto of the Purgatorio, on the occasion of the sixth Beatitude: Beati qui esuriunt et sitiunt justitiam,¹ After submitting it to a rather bold reinterpretation, with which we are not now concerned, the poet divides it into two parts esuriunt and sitiunt; furthermore, he places those who thirst for justice before those who hunger for it; in fine he understands by those who thirst for justice, those who desire what it is fiitting to desire and who desire it as it should be desired. The best way to understand who these men are, is to look at their opposites in purgatory, to wit, the avaricious, whom God punishes for their unruly love of gold, and also the prodigals who, on the contrary, squander away riches of which the right use could be beneficial to others.² The second half of the Beatitude concerns the men who hunger for justice. Their opposites in purgatory are the gluttons and, generally speaking, those guilty of intemperance. To conclude: “Those are blest, in whom grace so abounds, that the love of the pleasures of taste does not burn too fiercely in their breasts and that they always hunger just as much as is right.” (Purg. XXIV, 151-154).

The punishment of the intemperates is appropriate. The population of the twenty fourth canto of the Purgatorio consists of shades so exceedingly lean that, for one who has seen them in life, they now are past recognition. They are doubly shadowy shades. What has reduced them to this pitiful condition is the very torture to which many of our own contemporaries submit themselves, if not with pleasure, at least of their own accord; namely la dieta, diet, the abstention from food.³ As is the rule in the Divine Comedy, Virgil is at that moment aware that Dante is eager to ask a question, and as he encourages him to speak his mind, Dante naturally asks the question present to the minds of all his readers: How can one lose weight by dieting in a place where there is no need to eat?⁴

And indeed that is a good question. Whatever their nature, the shades of Hades are mere images of their former bodies; they are some sort of spooks, merely spectral beings; how to make spectres become still leaner than they naturally are, is indeed quite a proposition. Fully aware of the difficulty, the poet will proceed to a precise description of their nature: What kind of being is a shade?

The shades, le ombre, are not real bodies. The shadow projected by a body is not itself a body, yet it is at least visible and it more or less resembles its body. The shades too are sorts of shadows, so they are not nothing, but they are something for the sight only: O ombre vane fuor che nell’ aspetto! At the moment he is saying these words Virgil has just experienced their truth, for indeed, as a shade had approached him with the manifest intention of embracing him with great affection, Virgil had obeyed the urge to reciprocate, but in vain, for he had had to realize that the shade was for him something to see, nothing to touch: “Thrice did I clasp my hands behind him, and thrice did I clasp them on my own breast.”⁵ In other words, if one attempts to embrace a shade, his arms and hands go through it. And the shades themselves are painfully aware of their condition. In another passage of the Purgatorio, the poet Statius suddenly realizes that his interlocutor is Virgil, the same poet for whom he has just expressed feelings of warm admiration; deeply moved, he wants to kneel before the master and to kiss his feet, but Virgil stops him: “No, brother, don’t, for you are a shade and what you see is a shade.” Whereupon, rising to its feet, the shade of Statius exclaims: “Now at least you can see the extent of my love for you, since it causes me to forget our emptiness and treat a shade as if it were a substantial reality.”⁶

We all resemble Statius in this respect. Were we wise enough to read Dante for our pleasure, we would let well enough alone and ask no questions. Only, this time, Dante himself is asking the question. We know it is a characteristic feature of Dante's poetry that, in it, beauty and truth, bellezza and bontà, should always be both distinguished and united. Moreover, Dante was of the opinion that the pleasure of enjoying the substantial truth of the poem was greater than that of feeling its beauty.⁷ Hence the belated scruple he seems to have felt when, reaching about the middle of the Sacred Poem, he realized that, ever since the beginning of the Inferno, he had been talking of shades, and to shades, without pausing one moment to consider their nature. What is a shade of Hades? How are such beings born? Why do these unsubstantial images resemble their former bodies? How do the souls of the shades manage to move them at will, to make them talk and cry as they formerly used to do when they animated their bodies before death?

In order to answer these questions, Dante resorts to the scientific embryogeny of Aristotle as perfected by the theology of Thomas Aquinas. The production of the shades in the netherworld will be conceived after the pattern of the production of the body by the soul in this present life. How it is that that which is produced in the other world is but a shade, not a real living body, is what Dante will attempt to make clear for us.

The origin of the formation of the body is the blood of the father. That blood is not completely absorbed by the veins through which it flows; what of it is left is saved for future use. In the heart, that blood acquires a formative virtue (or formative power) that will enable it to shape all the limbs of the future body. It will turn itself into these limbs, just as it turns itself into the veins in which it is contained. After undergoing a second digestion in the heart, the blood flows down into certain organs it is better to leave unnamed and, thence again, it trickles into a natural vessel of another human being (i.e. the female), so that it falls upon somebody else's blood. There the two bloods blend together, one of them (the female blood) being passive by natural disposition, while the other one is active in virtue of the perfection of the form in which it originates. As soon as it is in the female organ, the active blood begins to operate; first it coagulates, next it vivifies the clot to which it has conferred a consistency fitting the nature of such matter. That active virtue in the blood thus becomes a soul, such as that of a plant (i.e. a vegetative soul), with this difference however, that the vegetative soul of a plant has already reached in it the term of its development, whereas the soul of a man, which is the one we are now describing, is still on its way to a further goal; the vegetative soul of a man is a future intellective soul, that of a plant is incapable of further progress: quest’è in via e quella è gia a riva.

The active virtue of the blood then exerts itself so strongly that the clot begins to feel and to move, like a sea fungus, and it sets about shaping up the organs of which itself is the seed. Thus born of the heart of the begetter, the plastic virtue dilates and extends itself to all the parts where nature intends to produce members. Up to this point, Dante has simply followed the embryogeny of Aristotle and of scholastic medicine, but we are here reaching the point where, after living as a sort of plant, then an animal, the embryo will become a human body animated by a rational soul. Dante here seems to remember the controversies still active in the schools of the time, particularly at the universities of Paris and Padua, on the origin of the rational soul and its relationship with the body. The theology of Thomas Aquinas now replaces the biology of Aristotle. The first thought of Dante is of the celebrated doctrine of Averroes on the separation of the intellective power of man, and he rejects it: “Still you do not yet see how, from being an animal, the embryo becomes a child. This is a point on which a wiser man than you are has been mislead. According to his doctrine the possible intellect must needs be separated from the soul, because no organ seems to be used by that intellect.” But Averroes was wrong. In fact, as soon as the structure of the brain has been perfected by the plastic force at work in the embryo, “the Prime Mover turns toward it and, rejoicing in the wonderful art of nature, He breathes into it a new spirit full of force. Gathering into its own substance whatever active virtue there is to be found, that spirit grows into one single soul that lives, feels and is able to know itself.”⁸

So much philosophical and theological material is heaped up by Dante in these few lines that the better informed his reader is, the more discouraged he feels if he has to restate their meaning. Within the narrow space of two tercets, the poet has managed to recall (and reject) the doctrine of Averroes according to which the possible intellect is a Separate Substance; by the same token, he has taken sides with Thomas Aquinas in the then famous discussion on the unity of the substantial form in the composite, including man. Dante has done all that, in verse, and yet in a language technically so perfect that to retranslate it into the original school latin would be very easy. For instance, what is that intellective soul, in verse 75, which sè in sè rigira, if not the very same of which Thomas often says that it is able to reflect upon itself reditione completa? But the main point here seems to be the touch of Christian naturalism which represents God proudly rejoicing at the sight of the natural beauty He himself has created. The middle ages at their best here are speaking through the mouth of Dante, and their voice is one on this point with that of Thomas Aquinas.

Everything here is Thomistic: the Christian doctrine that rational souls are immediately created by God is being maintained by Dante in the same spirit, and often in the same terms, as it was in the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas. The sensitive soul, Thomas says, is transmitted by the begetter along with the seed; it is not immediately created by God;⁹ on the contrary, the rational soul, which is the sole substantial form there is in man,¹⁰ cannot be caused by way of animal generation, but by way of direct creation only.¹¹ Just as he follows Thomas in theology, Dante follows Aristotle in biology and embryogeny, at least on general lines. What else could he do? Himself a theologian, he had learned biology in the schools, and to reform it was none of his business. So, according to Dante, to Thomas and to Aristotle, the seed is not borrowed from the very substance of the full grown begetter, otherwise, being itself fully formed, it would have no aptitude left to inform the different parts of the body still to be born. If it is to perform these various functions the seed must originate in some element still in potency to all the limbs and organs of the future animal it is going to animate. Now there is only one such element, blood. Only blood is in potency with respect to the whole body, because it is generated from the food before being turned into the very substance of each particular organ.¹² We still are following Aristotle: semen est superfluum alimenti.

What has all this to do with the origin and nature of the shades of Hades? Everything. I have just been following the explanation given by Statius to Dante, and the main feature of the doctrine is that, in it, the embryogeny of the shades is one particular case of the embryogeny of human beings in general. Dante himself realizes that his own poetic exposition of it makes it still more difficult to understand in verse than it would be in plain scholastic latin prose. Hoping to make things easier for the reader, he resorts to some simple comparisons. Before inviting Statius to answer Dante's question, Virgil has told the poet, banteringly, that with a little attention he could solve the problem by himself. If only, Virgil tells Dante, you did remember how the poet Meleager was destroyed by a wasted brand, the question would not look to you so hard to answer. To which he adds that if we noticed how our own images in mirrors seem to follow our movements, the answer would be at hand. Now, surely, among modern readers, few if any still remember Meleager,¹³ and we do not see at once how images reflected in mirrors by real bodies are related to visible forms produced in empty space by bodies that do not exist. Since there is no short cut, we must fall back on our previous biological considerations.

We stopped at the moment when the blood and its active plastic virtue have brought the human body to completion. If the story looks incredible to us, Dante says, let us only consider how, when united to the juice of the grape, the heat of the sun becomes wine. At present, however, the thing is done and the body pursues the course of its life until the moment comes when Lachesis has no more thread left for it. The soul then separates itself from the body and carries away with itself the human and the divine elements it contains. All the other powers, of which the operations require the cooperation of the body, cease at once to operate while, on the contrary, memory, intelligence and will grow keener in their operations than ever before. All this expresses traditional views on the condition of the soul after death, but, thus far, the shades have no place in it. Where are the separated souls going to go between the time of the death of their bodies and the resurrection?

There are two ways of access to the netherworld, or, rather, there is only one, that which leads to hell, for the other one, which leads to purgatory, does not really lead to the netherworld, but to heaven.

As soon as it has left its body, without stopping (senz’ arrestarsi), of its own accord (per se stessa) and in a wondrous way (mirabilmente) the soul falls on either one of two shores, thereby getting the first intimation of its final destination. Dante does not mention any particular judgment of the soul by God but, rather, he presents the whole process as an almost natural one. Not quite, however, for there is something astounding in the very way the soul directs itself towards its appointed goal, and does so without any special intervention of God.

Once it has found its place, the soul initiates a new cycle of operations, of which the result will be the constitution of its shade. Why that new cycle? Normally speaking, death is for man the end of the line. In the philosophy of Aristotle death means the separation of the soul from the matter of the body of which it is the form. The material body is corrupted while the soul returns to the potency of matter; another man can now be born, but the history of the former is finished. In the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the separated soul survives and preserves its individuality, but the body is corrupted and its soul will survive it, bodiless, until its body will be resurrected by God on the last day. There are no shades of Hades in the world of Aristotle or in that of Thomas Aquinas. The new cycle of operations imagined by Dante has for its object to account for the existence of such shades in his own poetic universe. On this precise point, Dante is entirely on his own; he will make Aristotle answer a question which the Philosopher had never asked.

The death of the body has not deprived the soul of its virtute formativa, or plastic power. As soon as it finds itself in a new place and in a new environment, the soul begins to irradiate it, simply because it is of its very nature to emit such radiations. In this sense, one could say that there never is anything like a ‘separated soul’ in the world of Dante, for right after the death of its body, it continues to exercise on its new environment the formative energy by which it first produced the limbs and the organs of the living body; only, because the new material at its disposal is no longer blood, the product of its new activity cannot be a real body made up of flesh, as the living body is. What then happens is this. “Just as, when it is saturated with rain and moisture, the air adorns itself with various colors due to the refraction of the sunbeams, even thus the surrounding air assumes the shape impressed on it by the (formative) power of the surviving soul; and as a tiny flame follows a fire wherever it goes, so too the spirit of the dead is everywhere accompanied by that new aerial shape. Because it has thus been rendered visible, the spirit is called a shade; it then fashions the organs of each sense, including even that of sight.” All this, which sounds to modern ears like a tall story, is said by Dante in all seriousness: Perocchè quindi ha poscia paruta, / è chiamata ombra. Whereupon Dante makes Statius add: “And this is how we shades laugh, how we fashion the tears and the sighs you may have heard on the mount. According as certain desires and other affections arise in it, a shade shapes itself differently, and that is the cause of what occasions thy surprise.”¹⁴

In this passage, Dante has given us a complete scientific explanation of the origin, growth and functioning of a class of beings of which the very existence is, to say the least, doubtful. It deserves to be called scientific because it follows the pattern of the biological description of the formation of the human body given by Aristotle in De Generatione animalium, I, 21-22. The very same plastic power that has shaped the solid living body of man continues to operate after the latter's death and it operates in the same way. The reason it then causes a shade rather than a body is that the matter on which it now operates is no longer the same; it is not blood and flesh, but, rather, air thickened by moisture. Still, between death and the resur-rection, the soul provides itself with a pseudo-body capable of imitating the appearance of a living body and, by its attitudes as well as its language, of expressing its sentiments and even the thoughts of the soul that animates it. The continuity of the biological process is unbroken and it follows from one and the same cause, the plastic power of the soul.

Did Dante himself believe in the reality of those poetic beings? The belief in the reality of ghosts, spooks and phantoms of every denomination is far from extinct in our own days; it was almost universally held in the time of Dante. He himself could hardly believe in the reality of his own shadowy people, since he must have been aware of inventing it as he went along, but he certainly believed in the actual existence of such men and women subsisting in hell and purgatory. That he took seriously his explanation of their origin and nature is even more certain. If there are shades, their origin and nature must needs be such as he himself describes them. He shows himself too careful to follow in the wake of Aristotle not to convey to the reader the irresistible impression that what he says is to be taken seriously.

Two orders of considerations suggest that Dante really believed in the existence of such beings, the one related to the theological conception of the angels, the other related to the condition of the soul between the death and the resurrection of its body.

The angels are pure spirits; hence they are naturally invisible. That they sometimes are seen is always the effect of a special grace of God. In fact, the apparition of an angel is always a miracle, but even a miracle should at least be possible. Like a shade in hell, a visible angel is an incorporeal spirit that causes itself to be seen under the appearance of a body. There were various theological explanations of what was considered an indubitable fact. According to Thomas Aquinas, whom Dante usually follows in such matters, angels merely assume the appearance of a body. It is not a real body because, not being a living soul (that is, the substantial form of a body) an angel does not animate his visible appearance from within so as to cause in it the operations of life. What we call the body of an angel is not an animal body; it does not live. In the Summa Theologiae the Angelic Doctor asks: “Whether the angels assume bodies”, then “Whether the angels exercise the operations of life in the bodies assumed by them.”¹⁵ The answer to the first question is yes, to the second question is no. In such pseudo-bodies angels appeared to Abraham and to his family, them to Lot and to the inhabitants of Sodom, and again to Tobias and his friends. Such beings are not truly living bodies, yet they are not mere visions or products of the imagination either. They are true objects actually seen by the eyes; the angles are said to assume such bodies, because they do not animate them as though they were their souls.

How do angels assume bodies? Thomas Aquinas has offered a tentative answer to the question. The angels cannot assume earthly bodies, otherwise they could not instantaneously vanish, as they do, at any moment they may wish to disappear. Neither can they make themselves such bodies out of thin air, for indeed air cannot be given shape and color, whereas appearing angels are visible and colored beings. But here is a possibility which closely resembles that imagined by Dante: “Although air, taken in its natural condition of thinness, can receive neither shape nor color, it can receive both when it is in a state of condensation, as is the case with clouds. Even so do angels assume bodies made up out of air, by condensing it, through the power of God, as much as is necessary for giving it the shape of a body.” The proximate cause of that condensation is not conceived by Thomas Aquinas in the same way as Dante: in Dante the cause is the moisture of air in an obscure subterranean place; in Thomas Aquinas, it is a sort of air reduction miraculously caused by God; yet there is a common element: in both cases, a spiritual being, angel or intellective soul, manages to fabricate unto itself a mock body. In both cases the bodily appearances are but ombre vane fuorchè nell’ aspetto, but they can be seen.

Even within that resemblance, however, there is an important difference, for the angels fabricate their pseudo-bodies at will, with the miraculous assistance of God who enables them to condense the surrounding air, whereas the Dantean shade secretes, so to speak, its apparent body by the natural exercise of its own plastic power. The separated soul does not assume a body in the proper acceptation of the verb; its operation much more resembles that of a true soul making up a body with the material at its disposal. Hence, an important difference between the angel and the shade, for in a way that shade can be said to be animated from within by its soul, of which it spontaneously assumes all the atittudes required for the expression of its feelings, thoughts and acts of will. An easy way to realize the difference is to go back to the question asked by Thomas Aquinas: Whether the angels and the devils have bodies naturally united to them. Thomas answers it in the negative.¹⁶ In Dante's netherworld, the question should receive an affirmative answer. As the poet describes it, the formation of the shade by the separated soul is an entirely natural operation. True, the shades have no real organs, no blood, no true animal life, yet their cause is the very same formative or plastic power by which the living corporeal body of man is progressively brought to completion. The Most High Poet has adapted to the needs of his own universe the data provided by the theology of his time. Having to describe beings similar to the angels of the theologians, he has borrowed from the Angelic Doctor some usable material and submitted it to a thorough reinterpretation.

Another theological problem could help Dante orientate himself in his own poetic universe. The theologians themselves found it difficult to account for the condition of the soul between the death of man and the resurrection of his body. Souls are judged right after death and it was the firm conviction of Thomas Aquinas that they began to be punished as soon as they were judged. Moreover the souls of the damned began at once to suffer corporeal punishments, especially fire. How can that be, since the souls of the dead remain deprived of their bodies until the day of the resurrection? Now during that long stretch of time the souls of the dead find themselves in a situation similar to that of the Dantean shades; they are without bodies, yet they are suffering bodily punishments.

Thomas Aquinas freely acknowledges that the thing is naturally impossible. In the natural order, the soul suffers from its body only because it is united with it as its form: how can it suffer bodily pain while it is bodiless? Thomas answers that what is not naturally possible then becomes possible by the allpowerfulness of God. It is natural for souls to be united with bodies because it has pleased God that things should be that way, but souls can be conjoined with matter in any number of other ways. With the help of devils, the necromancers can magically bind the spirits of other men to small statues and other images; why cannot the spirits of the damned be subjected to the power of fire by the mere will of God? It is even for these unfortunate spirits a superadded affliction to find themselves subjected to the power of such a low thing as material fire in punishment for their sins.

This curious doctrine opened for Dante speculative possibilities but it left the poet's imagination entirely resourceless. Let us not forget that, as a poet, Dante was not in charge of teaching theology, but he had to imagine it, to express it under the form of plastic images and, so to speak, to make us see it. Now, following the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas, between death and the resurrection, since there are no bodies left, there is nothing left to be seen. The souls of the damned suffer from eternal fire, but this is being achieved without bodies, without shades and even, if it so pleases God, without fire. Thomas himself admits that certain expressions used by Scripture in speaking of the corporeal punishment of the damned should be understood allegorically. The notorious “gnawing worm” of Isaias (66:24) can be interpreted as meaning the remorse torturing consciences. Albert the Great had already observed that, were it a real animal in real fire, the worm would have been consumed a long time ago. Thomas contents himself with observing that, just now, a material worm cannot well bite an immaterial substance and that, in the future, it will not be able to do so either, since after their resurrection all the bodies will enjoy the privilege of being incorruptible. For the same reason tears and the grinding of teeth do not make sense in the case of separated souls and of resurrected bodies. Incorruptible bodies are impassible; they can neither dissolve into tears nor be ground away. Such tropes mean only that the souls of the damned can experience deep sorrow and that such disturbances in the head and eyes usually attend the shedding of tears.¹⁷ All this can be achieved by God even without real heads, eyes and tears.

This leaves us far from the poetic hell of Dante, a visible and tangible place somewhere below the surface of the earth and full of its impressive array of tortured sinners. Now the point was not unimportant for Dante. On the contrary, as a poet, he had to make us see, at least in imagination, the truth of the theological doctrine: it was therefore necessary for him to show us, by inventing an appropriate imagery, the literal truth of Scripture rather than to elaborate on its allegorical meaning. The body here becomes all-important as being the first victim of the punishment and the first plastic figuration of the tortures it suffers; thus it comes first in the intentions of the poet. But Dante is well equipped to solve the difficulty, since, without being bodies in the full sense of the word, his shades have bodies of a sort, which the separated souls of the theologians have not. Moreover, these bodies are related to their souls by positive bonds, which the apparitions of angels are not. Being produced out of dense air by the very same plastic force that shapes living bodies, the shades naturally resemble the living bodies to which they succeed. That is the reason Dante recognizes the shades of many men and women he used to know before their death. He can read their feelings on their faces and carry on normal conversations with them. Why should not such souls be able to act upon their shades as they used to act upon their bodies? Just as their former bodies, their shades are their own work. Obviously, the shades of Dante's Inferno are specifically different from the separated souls of Thomas Aquinas.

On the contrary, they closely resemble the ghosts of popular belief, as exemplified, for instance, by the treatise of Saint Augustine De Cura pro mortuis gerenda ad Paulinum. For indeed, although he is a theologian, Augustine does not ask any precise questions about the nature of those curious beings and he takes their very reality for granted. It is interesting to note that Augustine does not believe that what Virgil pretends to have seen in hell is true; on the contrary, he thinks that, to Virgil himself, the narrative of the Aeneid was but a poetic lie: “Velut si quisquam videat in somnis, quod Aeneas vidisse apud inferos poetica falsitate narratur.” What we today call telepathy was to Augustine a clear proof that such visions are possible. In such cases, what is seen is neither the soul nor the body of a man, but his image. By this word, Augustine probably signifies the equivalent of the Greek word eidolon:¹⁸ “Sic autem infirmitas sese habet, ut cum in somnis quisque viderit mortuum, ipsius animam se videre arbitretur; cum autem vivum similiter somniaverit, non ejus animam, neque corpus, sed hominis similitudinem sibi apparuisse non dubitet.” The man whose image is thus seen at a distance may well be unaware of the fact. While Augustine himself was in Milan, he appeared (at least his similitudo did) to one of his ancient students then teaching rhetoric in Carthage, and finding himself embarrassed by a passage in Cicero which he was to explain the next day to his own pupils: “Qua nocte somnianti ego illi quod non intelligebat exposui: imo non ego, sed imago mea, nesciente me, et tam longe trans mare aliquid aliud sive agente, sive somniante et nihil de illius curis omnino curante.” A more complicated anecdote is that of a certain Curma, mistakenly called to the netherworld in place of another Curma, going there and, once out of his lethargy, telling what he had seen. What made him realize that he was dreaming was that, “inter eos defunctos, quos videbat pro meritorum diversitate tractari, agnovit etiam nonnullos quod noverat vivos.”¹⁹ That was exactly what Dante himself was going to do with Brunetto Latini and the others, men and women, whom he had known still living on earth.

In his De Genesi ad litteram, bk. XII, ch. 33, § 62, Augustine has a question De Inferis, in which, after maintaining that hell itself (not what Virgil said of it) is not a poetic fiction but a reality, he confesses himself embarrassed on how to understand the celebrated passage of the gospel of Luke on the wicked rich. The beggar Lazarus died, he was carried by angels into Abraham's bosom (Luke, 16:22-26), “and then the rich man also died: and he was buried in hell.” Now Abraham recognizes both Lazarus and the rich man: how can one recognize souls? Augustine answers that the nature and place of hell is uncertain, for indeed why should the place be called inferi, if it is not located below the surface of the earth? On the contrary, Augustine does not merely believe that the soul is incorporeal, he knows it. But then the questions arises: if it is incorporeal, how is it that, in dreams, one sees souls bearing the resemblance of bodies, standing, sitting, walking, and even flying? The notion of eidolon once more helps him out of trouble: similitudes of bodies are in hell as in similitudes of places, but, of course, Augustine realizes how weak the answer is and that, finally, he does not know how:

Quanquam possimus ostendere illorum quoque sapientes de inferorum substantia minime dubitasse, quae post hanc vitam excipit animas mortuorum. Unde autem sub terris esse dicantur inferi, si corporalia loca non sunt, aut unde inferi appellentur, si sub terris non sunt, merito quaeritur. Animam vero non esse corpoream, non me putare, sed plane scire, audeo profiteri; tamen habere posse similitudinem corporis et corporalium omnino membrorum quisquis negat, potest negare animam esse, quae in somnis videt vel se ambulare, vel sedere, vel hac atque illac gressu aut etiam volatu ferri ac referri, quod sine quadam similitudine corporis non fit. Proinde si hanc similitudinem etiam apud inferos gerit, non corporalem, sed corpori similem, ita etiam in locis videtur esse non corporalibus, sed corporalium similibus, sive in requie, sive in doloribus.”²⁰

That no technical explanation of the nature and origin of the shades seems to have been attempted before Dante, does not mean that the popular belief in such beings had not been shared by many theologians. In his Dialogues, IV, 25-58, pope Gregory the Great has a mine of anecdotes and indications concerning the way he himself conceived, or imagined, the condition of souls after death, but he does not seem to have attempted to explain how spiritual souls can suffer from corporeal fire; they do so suffer, and that is all we know about it. The angels gather together the sinners that are destined to suffer the same kind of torments, “luxuriosi cum luxuriosis, avari cum avaris,” etc. In short, “similes in culpa ad tormenta similia deducuntur, quia eos in locis paenalibus angeli deputant.” So we have here a weak foreshadowing of the ‘circles’ in Dante's Inferno. Like Dante, Gregory thinks that those who have visited the netherworld can tell about what they have seen there; the meeting with the soul of the deacon Paschasius could have easily found its place in the Divine Comedy. Like Augustine, Gregory is not sure where hell is located, but he does know that one and the same fire can torment different souls according to the diversity of their sins, and that of such torments there is no end.²¹

Saint Julian, bishop of Toledo (d. 690) has left us a curious Prognostikon futuri saeculi²² as interesting for what he says as for the authorities he quotes. For instance, Julian reproduces the passage of Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram quoted above. He offers no explanation for the fact that incorporeal souls can suffer from corporeal fire, but he devotes four chapters to the problem raised by the fire of purgatory (cap. 19-22) and another one (cap. 24) to the possibility there is, for the souls of the dead, to recognize one another, even, as Gregory had already stipulated, souls of persons they have never seen in life. The gospel of the wicked rich man and of Lazarus is here again exploited in full. The passage likewise borrowed from Augustine, De Cura pro mortuis, cap. 15, stipulates that while the dead do not know what the living do at the time they are doing it, they nevertheless can receive information about it afterwards. Particularly interesting is the remark that the dead can receive news from the earth through men who, dying after them, can go and carry to them pieces of new in which they may be interested (cap. 29; PL 96, 492). Naturally, the dead can appear to the eyes of the living (cap. 30) but only the souls of the blessed can know what the living are doing (cap. 31), as, in fact, Beatrice knows what Dante is doing on earth. Another interesting chapter (cap. 39) establishes the reality of the pleasures and pains experienced by the souls separated from their bodies by comparing them with those we experience in dreams; however, those of the afterlife are more vivid than those experienced in dreams.

Recently published texts of Eric of Auxerre bear testimony to the survival of those notions in the early middle ages.²³ Eric borrows freely from Saint Julian's Prognostikon futuri saeculi: at present the souls of the deceased are kept in certain receptacles; the souls that are saved, but still imperfect, do not directly go to heaven; how the souls pass from the body to heaven or to hell; the soul resembles its body; the souls of the dead can recognize one another after the death of the flesh; the dead can visibly appear to the eyes of the living. These notions, and similar ones, integrate the picture of a future life of which the reality seems to have been widely accepted, at least under the form of popular belief, and which Dante himself probably never thought of questioning. The whole Inferno is such a netherworld inhabited by visible and recognizable shades, naturally unaware of what is going on in our own world, but anxious to receive news brought to them by those who died after them or who, like Dante, are still living in it. Of course, this does not mean that Dante believed in the reality of the scenes in the Comedy which his poetic imagination invited him to describe. His own shades are poetic creations; their true antecedents are neither philosophical, nor theological; one should rather look for them in Virgil's poetry, particularly in the VIth book of the Aeneid.

Everything in the Comedy recalls to the reader's mind the presence of Virgil. The facts are so well known that I shall content myself with briefly listing some of them. Virgil is the guide of Dante during his journey to hell and part of the Purgatorio; as a writer and an artist Virgil is the poet Dante quotes as his model, his master: “You are my master and my model …,” you are the only one to whom I am indebted for the beautiful style that has made me famous. Now there was one good reason why Dante should be particularly interested in what Virgil had said of the other world. Having to write a poem of which the setting would be hell, purgatory and paradise, the poet could not fail to realize that Scripture says practically nothing about these places. The few samples we have borrowed from the theologians suggest that there was no theological notion of their nature, apart, of course, from the notion of their general destination. As far as that aspect of his work was concerned, Dante found himself on his own. Now precisely Virgil was there to fill the gap. The medieval culture of the grammatica, wherein Virgil reigned supreme, did not permit anybody to ignore the Aeneid, especially that part of it which, presupposing the immortality of souls, attributed to each and every man a future life of misery or of happiness. To the extent that they attempted to imagine that kind of life, Christians found more help in Virgil than in the Old and the New Testaments.

The Fathers of the Latin Church could not forget that Virgil had been for them an eminently classical author during their school years.²⁴ The mere fact that the Aeneid confirmed the belief in the reality of a future life was enough to recommend it to their favorable attention. But Virgil had done more. Already Lactantius had been pleased to find in the words addressed by Anchises to his son Aeneas an answer to the objection: “If the soul is immortal, how can it be tortured?”²⁵ A pertinent question indeed, since to be tortured is passively to undergo an action, and passivity is a sure token of destructibility. Bur Virgil himself had wondered about the nature of the strange beings he called vitae (souls), or umbrae (shades): “Di quibus imperium est animarum umbraeque silentes (Aen. VI, 264). He had attributed to some of them a definite shape: forma tricorporis umbrae. Like those of Dante, the shades of the Virgilian netherworld were little more than shadows, but they could be very impressive ones. Dante never loses completely his sense of the comical. He can laugh at the personage he himself would have been in hell, had he really been there; when the devils become too frightening, he hides behind Virgil and clings to his garment; but Aeneas is a hero; on similar occasions, Aeneas draws his sword and gets ready to fight. The wise Sybil then holds him back and warns him that the beings he sees are but empty and unsubstantial souls (vitas), mere images flitting in empty shells. Did Virgil strike one of them, his sword would vainly cut through mere shadows: frustra ferro diverberet umbras (Aen. VI, 290-294). I have quoted above the case of Statius trying to embrace the shade of Virgil and thrice closing his arms on his own chest; now that was a reminiscence of Aeneid, VI, 700-702, where Aeneas encounters his father Anchises and three times attempts to embrace him, but in vain, for each time “the shade runs through his hands, like the light breath of a breeze or vanishing dream.”

To Virgil as to Dante the shades are a problem, but not exactly the same problem. Following the tradition of Plato's school, Virgil considers the virtuous souls as destined to come back to life after undergoing in another world the necessary purification. Their reward will be to see again, in new bodies, the light of the sun. On that point the shade of Anchises delivers, for the benefit of his son Aeneas, a lecture that parallels the lengthy explanation of the origin and nature of the shades given by Statius to Dante in the Comedy. All remember the solemn beginning of the passage, VI, 724-751: Principio caelum ac terras camposque liquentes. … In the beginning heaven, seas, earth, everything is quickened from within by a spirit (spiritus); a kind of thought permeates that mass and animates it, running through its various parts and moving them. Such is the origin of life and of living beings. That primordial force never ceases to be present in matter. There still remains in every living germ, or seed, a kind of spark of energy of the same nature as fire. That igneus vigor of celestial origin subsists as long as unwholesome elements do not deaden bodies and their decaying organs. Thus imprisoned in perishing bodies, souls experience pleasures and pains, desires and fears, so much so that, during the course of their lives, they grow more and more blind to intellectual light. At the last moment of their lives, these unfortunate souls have not succeeded in completely ridding themselves of their blemishes of corporeal origin. On the contrary, these defects have grown amazingly deep roots into them, and such is the reason the souls are punished after the death of their bodies. They have to pay off in torments the price of their past wrongs: ergo exercentur poenis veterumque malorum suppliciis expendunt. … Thus are some of them hanging in the air and shaken by the winds, while others are expiating their crimes at the bottom of some deep hole, or are burning in fire. In short, whoever we are, we all have to expiate for our own past: quisque suos patimur manes. … Only the small number of the perfect will recover, purified, the spark of heavenly fire they were at the beginning, and that also is the moment when the shades of Virgil begin to desire to return to their body: incipiunt in corpore velle reverti. … ²⁶

The similarity between the umbrae of Virgil and the ombre of Dante is striking to the point of being evident. Nobody has ever missed it. In both cases the shades have been imagined by two great poets as the natural inhabitants of their respective poetic worlds. As has been seen, great theologians have shared with Virgil and popular belief the certitude of the existence of such shades (ghosts, spooks, etc.), but none of them, among those I happen to know, has given them a theological status. If one goes beyond the level of the mere anecdote, there are no rationally justified shades in the universe of the Christian theologians; there are only angels and demons, who are pure spirits, and provisorily separated souls waiting for the time when they will recover their resurrected bodies. Like the souls of Virgil, those of Dante incipiunt in corpore velle reverti …, although while the Virgilian souls of the good desire to begin again living an earthly life, the Dantean souls aspire to recover their lost bodies, either for eternal blessedness or for eternal misery. The whole population of the Aeneid, book VI, consists of shades. The filiation is beyond doubt, so much so that, had we no other arguments, this sole fact would suffice to establish the intentionally poetic essence of the universe described by the Divine Comedy. All hypotheses on the non-expressed intentions of a writer are arbitrary; yet it is permitted to consider, at least as a possibility, that the attempt of Virgil to give a scientific explanation of the origin and nature of his shades invited Dante to imagine the theory of his own Aristotelian ombre. At any rate, the shades of Dante are incomparably more solidly established than those of Virgil; taking the word science in the meaning it had at the time of Dante, it is literally correct to say that, by connecting their explanation with the embryogeny of Aristotle, Dante has conferred on the ombre of the Comedy, a scientifically justified status. Furthermore, because they are engaged in a Christian universe which Dante conceives as swayed by the supreme law of Justice, the shades of Dante are fully conscious of their personal destinies. At each moment every one of them knows where it is and the reason it is there. Assuredly Dante has put himself, with all his loves and hates, in his poem, and that is what makes it to be a sort of personal confession at the same time as a profession of faith. The Sacred Poem is full of substance, yet, at the same time, it remains an art-created universe; itself a reality, its substance is to provide a shadowy picture of reality. Virgil is a shade, Statius is a shade, all the characters in the play whom Dante meets in hell, in purgatory and even, paradoxially enough, in the lower circles of paradise, are likewise shades, that is to say, poetic creatures of Dante rather than real creatures of God. They are grandchildren of God, by Dante, himself one of God's masterpieces.

To sum up, in the order of the poetic filiation, the proximate sources of the shades of Dante are those of Virgil. He may have been prompted by the example of his master to improve on the explanation of their nature sketched in the Aeneid, but there is a point on which I can find for him no predecessor at all, even among the theologians of his own time. It is his boldness in providing a scholastic and Aristotelian explanation of those creatures of his imagination. In explicitly asking himself the question, and in giving it a precise answer, Dante was leaving us a perfect illustration of the dual nature of his own genius, equally anxious to create beauty and to teach truth. We know that, to him, the bellezza of a poem was a lesser source of joy than its bontà, or intelligible meaning. In this sense, the Divine Comedy itself must have been less admirable to him for its beauty than for its teaching. This certainly comes to us as a surprise, but it is perhaps the most evident proof that Dante and his work belong in the scholastic culture of the medieval world, not in the predominantly literary culture, Ciceronian rather than Virgilian in its inspiration, of which Petrarch was soon to be the elegant exponent. To confer upon the poetic world of Virgil a substantial reality borrowed from the biology of Aristotle was an undertaking of which nobody but Dante seems to have conceived the possibility.

Notes

1. Matt. 5: 6: “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after justice.” On the subject of this article, see my Trois études dantesques pour le VII^ecentenaire de la naissance de Dante, in AHDLMA, 32 (1965) 71-126. The present essay is a recasting of the first of those three studies: “Qu’est-ce qu’une ombre?” 71-93. I shall take the liberty of making cross references to the documentation found in the French article which the present article completes in a number of ways but especially by taking into account the survival of the popular belief in ghosts found in the writings of the Fathers of the Church such as Augustine and Gregory the Great. The two articles are complementary and should be read in relation to each other.

2. “And those whose longing is after justice he [the Angel] had called beati, but his words said it with sitiunt, without adding anything.” Purgatorio, XXII, 4-7. So, in Dante's own version of the sixth beatitude, the first men to be mentioned are those who thirst after righteousness. Hunger is introduced, as a second part of the same beatitude, in canto XXIV, 151-154: “And I heard him say: Beati …”, etc.

3. A shadow here observes that, in what follows, there is no harm in mentioning the proper names, for they have been so changed by fasting that they now are unrecognizable: “da ch’è si muta / nostra sembienza via per la dieta.” Purg., XXIV, 17-18.

4. Purg., XXV, 20-21.

5. Purg., II, 79-81.

6. Purg., XXI, 130-136.

7. Convivio, II, 12.

8. Purg., XXV, 70-75.

9. Summa Theol., I, 119, 1.

10. Op. cit., 1, 86, 4.

11. Op. cit., I, 90, 2. Cf. 118,2: “non potest (anima intellective) causari per generationem, sed solum per creationem a Deo.”

12. Summa Theol., I, 119, 2. Only blood can acquire in the heart “a tutte membra umane virtu informativa.” Purg., XXV, 40-41. This is what Thomas Aquinas calls to be “in potentia adtetum.”—For the Aristotelian background of the doctrine, see Aristotle, De Generatione animalium, lib. I, cap. 17-18, cap. 21 and cap. 22. Cf. the articles of Bruno Nardi listed in AHDLMA, 32 (1965), 74, note 4.

13. Ovid, Metamorph., 260-546. On the meaning of that allusion, see art. cit., AHDLMA, 32 (1965), 76.

14. Purg., XXV, 103-108.

15. Summa Theol., I, 51, 1; I, 51, 2 ad 2m, ad 3m. In his answer to the second objection Thomas stipulates that the body assumed by an angel is not united to it as a physical body is united to its soul; it is not a truly ‘animated’ body. On the other hand, it would not suffice to say that the body of an angel is united with him as with a mover. The body assumed by an angel is united with him as “with a mover represented by the moved body which it assumes.” The notion of a union consisting of a representation agrees with Dante's conception of the shades; they ‘represent’ their movers.—On the moist air used by the appearing angel in assuming its pseudo-body, “Dicendum quod licet aer, in sua raritate manens, non retineat figuram, neque colorem; quando tamen condensatur, et figurari et colorari potest, sicut patet in nubibus. Et sic angeli assumunt corpora ex aere, condensando ipsum virtute divina, quantum necesse est ad corporis assumendi formationem.” Summa Theol., I, 51, 2, ad 3m.

16. De Potentia, q. VI, art. 6.

17. Contra Gentiles, bk IV, cap. 90.

18. On the notion of eidolon, see “Ombre e luci dans la Divine Comédie,” AHDLMA, 32, 97-101.

19. Saint Augustine, De Cura pro mortuis gerenda ad Paulinum, x, Migne PL 40, 601; xi, 601 and 602; xii, 603.

20. Saint Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, xii, 33, PL 34, 481.

21. Saint Gregory the Great, Dialogi, iv, 28-29, PL 77, 365; iv, 35, 380-381; iv, 36, 384-385; iv, 40, 396-397; iv, 42, 401.

22. PL 96, 453-524.

23. Eric of Auxerre, Sententiae de libro prognosticorum, c. 1, ed. Riccardo Quadri, Collectanea di Eirico di Auxerre (Spicilegium Friburgense, 11) Fribourg-Suisse, 1966. The excerpts from St. Julian of Toledo are found pp. 140-161. See particularly pp. 141-144 and 146-147: quod nunc animae defunctorum in quibusdam receptaculis teneantur; quod anima similitudinem corporis habeat; quod animae mortuorum se invicem post mortem carnis recognescere possunt; utrum possint mortui viventium oculis apparere, etc.

24. Pierre Courcelle, ‘Les Pères de l’Église devant les enfers virgiliens,’ AHDLMA, 22 (1955) 5-74, particularly 47-55.

25. P. Courcelle, op. cit., 47.—On the answer of Saint Ambrose to the question, 49, notes 4 to 7.—Critical commentary of the speech of Anchises by saint Augustine: De Civitate Dei, XXI, 13; in P. Courcelle, op. cit., 55, note 1.—A capital difference should be noted. In Dante, the poet really descends into Hades; his visit there occupies the whole first third of the Divine Comedy, of which the very subject is a voyage to the other world. Not so in the Aeneid, of which the whole subject is the foundation of Rome and in which Aeneas does not enter Tartarus, the properly infernal part of the netherworld. In other words, there is no personal journey of Aeneas to the pagan equivalent of Dante's Inferno. And indeed, Aeneas is looking for his father Anchises, a noble soul not to be found in hell.

26. The Christian souls desire to recover their own bodies, but in a new and immortal condition. Augustine, De Civitate Dei. XXII, 26; in P. Courcelle, op. cit., 55, note 1.