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Saturday, April 29, 2006
Contra Dante
Dante has a problem. Much of his Comedy is untrue. An example: in the second canto of the Paradiso Beatrice takes Dante to the orb of the moon. Dante is curious as to why the face of the moon is particoloured, and wonders if it’s because the material out of which the moon is made varies in density. Beatrice rebukes him for his stupidity, and explains at length, and with no little obscurity, that the moon is the celestial object furthest removed from the Pure Intelligence of the Divine Empyrion, and is therefore the celestial object least purged of mutability by the eternal light and truth of God, which thereby causes the changes in colour.
As an explanation of the spots in the moon this is untrue. In fact the moon is particoloured because the material out of which it is made varies in density.
I start with this example because it seems to me unarguable that Beatrice’s dogmatic explanation contains a material untruth. There is another level of the poem, concerning what we might call moral truths, in which I would be similarly eager to argue the toss; but here my instances are not as straightforward as the moon one. I’ll give you an example of what I mean by the latter sort of untruths. The deeper in hell you go the worse the punishment. Dante pays pedantic attention to the justice and order of his arrangement of punishment and reward; which is to say to the truth of his assessment of the various degrees of severity in sin. They are all disposed according to a logical disposition of sin and virtue. Accordingly it will be easy for you to arrange the following sinners in order of respective dismerit, and guess their relative positions in Hell.
First, alchemists, doing nobody any harm, labouring away trying to turn base metals into gold. Secondly, the prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. Thirdly, Attila the Hun, godless mass-murderer and invader.
You’ve guessed it, haven’t you? Attila is in Upper Hell, in the seventh circle with ‘the wrathful’. Mohammed is Lower Hell, in the eighth circle, ‘fraud simple’ (in the ninth bolgia). Alchemists are down even lower; in the tenth bolgia. They’re there not because alchemic was considered a Satanic or magical art; but rather because it involved ‘the falsification of commodities’. Ah, those wicked chemists.
As I say, this seems to me morally untrue. But I have no comeback to the obvious objection—that I am merely attempting to foist my own, arbitrarily modern-day moral schema (‘genocide a worse crime than metallurgic chemistry’) upon a text which is, whatever else you may think, perfectly consistent in its own views. Dante, after all, does not consider me compelled to believe his morality. I have free will, in his schema. All he believes is that his morality, the Catholic-Christian morality of the fourteenth-century, is the true one.
But the explanation of the spots in the moon is straightforwardly untrue. And that’s a problem for Dante.
The point is that this would not be a problem, were it not the case that Dante’s great three-cornered Commedia is predicated fundamentally upon truth. More specifically, it is a poem that dramatises the whole of divine creation as a vast arena in which judgment, and love, are the twin intertwined determinants: God’s judgment divides souls into hell, the magic mountain resort of purgatory or heaven on the basis of how far they have accepted, and acted upon, the truth of divine revelation. If the Commedia is not true, then what good is it? Harold Bloom puts the case forcefully:
The reader who comes freshly to Dante will see very quickly that no other secular author is so absolutely convinced that his own work is the truth, all of the truth that matters most. [Harold Bloom, ‘The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice’, The Western Canon (1994)]
Robin Kirkpatric concurs: ‘plainly Dante himself was concerned in the poem with what he thought to be true … the Comedy is devoted to truth in the strongest sense .. the Comedy, then, is not, in any simple sense, a fictional work.’ [Dante: The Divine Comedy (CUP 2004), 1-3]. There’s a consensus on this point: Dante’s poem depends upon its truthfulness. It is predicated theologically, aesthetically and morally on the truth. Moreover, it seems clear to me plenty of people, and not just medieval-nostalgic Catholics, think it is true. Perhaps the formulation invoked might be something like ‘OK, not literally true, but spiritually true …’ By this readers might mean that they accept that there isn’t literally a huge cavern stretching from beneath Jerusalem to the centre of the globe where a three-headed monster fans the core to ice with his leathern wings (modern geology and physics tell us this is impossible); but that they nevertheless believe that this functions truly as a poetic image of the subterranean, lowly and monstrous nature of sin.
This won’t do. Dante was perfectly well aware of the different valences of ‘truth’. The Commedia does not operate only on the level of ‘poetic’ or allegorical truth. It does operate on that level, of course; but it also strives—explicitly, at length, and with a dedicated dialogic energy—for all the other sorts of truth as well. These various truths include: moral truth; scientific truth; doctrinal truth and aesthetic truth. All these quantities have true and false explanations, or aspects, or figures, and in a thousand various ways Dante’s poem exhorts us to choose the truth, and turn away the false. Moreover all these forms of truth are fundamentally determined by the same source: God. What this means is that it really isn’t possible to cherry-pick truths in Dante’s poem. It isn’t a matter of myriad tessellated assertions and judgments, any of which can be picked out without damage to the core truth of God. These truths are all true because God is true; they are interdependent and interwoven threads in the cosmos which God created.
This, then, is the problem. The presence of untruth in the Commedia is corrosive in ways that it would not be in a differently-configured text. It’s not that Dante is speculating about the nature of the spots in the moon, and happens to speculate wrongly. The explanation the poem offers is not Dantean speculation; it is a rigorously argued-through application of the entire logic of the poem. If it is untrue, then what is called into question is not Dante’s speculative powers but the truthfulness of the whole.
Now of course truth is not a simple monolithic quantity of right or wrong, against which a poem (particularly a poem as complex and deep-thinking—a poem as thoroughly engaged in dialectic progression—as this) can be judged. We don’t think so today, and Dante, for all his religious devotion, didn’t think so in the fourteenth-century. Indeed, it is clear that medieval philosophers had just as nuanced and sophisticated understanding of ‘truth’ as we do today. But this is precisely the problem. When faced with the untruthfulness of sections of the Commedia, we may be tempted to respond with a specie of surreptitious condescension—surreptitious because one thing all the Dante critics I have read agree upon is their explicit respect for Dante. It does not mix well with this to, in effect, patronise him: to say ‘well, perhaps Dante’s explanation for the markings in the moon (which observation stands synecdochally for his entire cosmology) is incorrect; but what else could you expect of somebody limited by medieval astronomy?’ To condescend to Dante in this way is to diminish the poem, haughtily characterising it as a work from the cultural adolescence of Europe. I know of no critics who are so disrespectful.
The Commedia is of course a work of elaborate and profound variety. It contains scores of expertly rendered and differentiated characters. Who could not love its inventive fabulation, its extraordinarily supple and assured command of its poetic idiom> But all this variety is summoned into existence in order to dramatise subordination to a singular identity, that of God’s. Everything in the poem necessarily exists underneath the monologic divine. This, we might say, goes without saying; what devout monotheist could do otherwise? Dante’s unitary impulse is evident in most of his work.
The De Monarchia, for instance, argues that, just as mankind possesses one spiritual leader (the Pope), so all the peoples of the world should be united into a universal community (universalis civilitas humani generis) under a single unitary secular leader. Let’s find an up-to-date terminological descriptor for this Dantean Caesar (such i one of the tasks of translation, after all). Let’s call him Czar. Or Kaiser. Or, indeed, let’s call him Fuhrer and be done with it. Dante is unambiguously advocating a Leader with absolute power over humanity, whose authority is derived from God and cannot be questioned. Naturally, as is the way with the rhetoric of fascism, this Fuhrer would devote himself to establishing peace, freedom, order, unity, harmony (destroying the beast of ‘multiplicity’) and so on.
The startling thing in all this is not that a medieval thinker might valorise a figure of ur-fascist political authority, but that modern-day Dantean scholars can become so thoroughly integrated into the textus corpus Dantei as to lose all perspective on such a political vision. ‘Unfortunately, what Dante wished for in the De Monarchia did not come about,’ says the usually sane Mark Musa, ‘and it is for this reason that the poet’s political focal point shifted from the empire to the Church when he was writing his Divine Comedy.’ I lay my finger on one word in that assessment, with my mouth open and my eyes wide. The word is ‘unfortunately.’
You what?
Dante is beguiling, as the very greatest artists almost always are; but do we really want to get carried quite so far away as that? The Commedia creates a world in which we can, imaginatively, enter; explore; in which we can (as many critics have) spend decades in delighted mental pilgrimage and devotion. To take the work as a master Fantasy, perhaps (and this is surely a case that can be argued) the ur-text in the long and fertile tradition of Catholic Fantasy, that leads to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings is also a devout and devotional work; it also generates an imaginative space in which readers can spend years exploring, contemplating, working through. There are differences. Some might consider it infra dig to bracket Tolkien and Dante together, since the one writes elevated poetry and the other populist prose, but I can’t agree with that. It seems to me increasingly apparent that Tolkien’s big book is one of the most significant pieces of fiction of the last century. More to the point, perhaps, is Tolkien’s explicit and ‘cordial’ dislike of allegory; the textual strategy which Dante inhabits more fully, more complexly, than most. But this point of difference is not so divisive as all that. Tolkien preferred ‘sub-creation’, as a post-Romantic (post Coleridgean) aesthetic of respectful imitation of the Divine act of creation. He eschews allegory because the world in which we live is not allegorical; because Christ is an incarnation, not an allegory, of God. But he shares with Dante the desire verbally to embody a truth he took to be core—a divine and Catholic truth.
But this is my nub. Tolkien’s sub-creation inoculates itself against the charge of untruthfulness by presenting itself precisely as fiction. Dante marches boldly into the malarial swamp of interpretation with no such protection. Everything in The Lord of the Rings is true by virtue of being sub-true, as its created world is sub-created; and what it is ‘sub’ is Divine reality. If anything in it is untrue, literally (magic) or otherwise (crypto-racist, some say) this need not corrode the larger truth of the whole. Dante presents us with a representation that presents this truth as unmediated; this, he says, is not some fantasy he’s spun out of his brain confected of his reading in Anglo Saxon culture and the legends of Charlemagne. This, he says, is how things really are.
‘Really are’ in several senses, of course; and most of them not transparently so. Did Dante and his readers really believe that the point antipodal on the globe to Jerusalem was the location for a mountain so tall that it reached literally into outer space? Maybe they did; but surely it need not upset us too much that the actual Jerusalem-antipode is a stretch of Pacific brine that cannot, by definition, reach higher than sea-level. After all Dante can hardly be blamed for not mounting an anachronistic expedition to the far side of the world to check his geography before writing? But this means that either we patronise Dante (refusing to ‘blame’ him) or else we confront the fact that his epic of truth is threaded through with untruth
.To put it another way; within the varieties of truth with which medieval thinkers were comfortable there was room for both a correspondence theory of truth and a notion of truth as revealed transcendental quantity. Charles Singleton in ‘Dante’s Allegory’ [in Robert J Clements (ed), American Critical Essays on the Divine Comedy (New York Univ. Press 1967), 91-103] describes how Dante distinguishes two kinds of allegory; the allegory of theologians and the allegory of poets. In the latter, there are two meanings: a fictional ‘surface’ meaning that yields, on proper reading, a true secondary meaning. In the allegory of the theologians there are also two meanings, but in this instance a true ‘surface’ meaning yields a true secondary meaning. For example; the Parliament of Fowls is a fictional poetic text that can be decoded as conveying a true meaning. The Bible on the other hand is true on both surface and allegorical levels. Singleton comments:
The Divine Comedy is for me so clearly the ‘allegory of the theologians’ that I can only continue to wonder at any efforts made to see it as the ‘allegory of the poets’ [96]
And quite right too. Corrosively right.
So, to return to the example of Dante’s (or Dante’s Beatrice’s) account of the marks on the face of the moon. This account is untrue. Now, it might be possible to argue that though this account is untrue its untruth doesn’t matter. Possible, but unhelpful; because this is tantamount to saying that, in this place in the poem, truth doesn’t matter, and this would be a proposition radically destructive of Dante’s whole project. It might, then again, be possible to say something along the lines of ‘were Dante alive today, and apprised of more accurate information concerning the discolouration of the moon, he would undoubtedly incorporate them in his poem.’ The point in saying this, presumably, is to absolve Dante of the charge of deliberately misleading us. But untruth need not involve a malicious and deliberate attempt to mislead. Moreover, it is inconceivable to me that Dante could incorporate modern scientific data into his vision—a heliocentric cosmos in which travelling to the moon, even when hurtling along faster than any bullet (the Apollo spacecraft traversed space at a speed of over ten kilometres a second) nevertheless takes the best part of three days … this is simply immiscible with the total design of the Commedia. It is a trivial observation that Dante’s poem does not take place in our cosmos; but in a Dante pre-Copernican one. Trivial except for the single destructive fact that the pre-Copernican model of the cosmos was untrue.
If we read Dante as Fantasy this problem goes away. But I don’t think we can read Dante as Fantasy. Or to be more accurate, I don’t believe Dante’s text wants us to read it as Fantasy. Its mode of allegory is not one of fictional correspondence to factual reality. It is that the truths of reality, of science, of art and of theology are all made possible by (and only by) the core truth of God.
This is only to say what Auerbach says in Mimesis: that Dante insists not only that ‘in the Commedia he presented a true reality’ but that the poem embodies what Auerbach calls ‘a serious realism.’ (‘however different medieval and modern realism may be, they are at one in this basic attitude’: a figural attitude in which every detail is true in itself and true in the larger, transcendental sense). The success of Madame Bovary depends on our sense, as readers, that people really are like this, really interact in these ways, really do live according to these habits, beliefs, joys and miseries. If Charles Bovary’s neighbour were a forty foot giant breathing fire and calling his friends on his mobile phone it would undo Flaubert’s good work. The weave would unravel. And this is precisely the problem of that earlier, greater realist, Dante.
Comments
I would be curious to know where The Bible fits into your schema, as it too is a text riddled with factual errors that nevertheless presents itself as the truth.
I am also curious about the consequences of this problem. What do we do with the text, now that we have identified this problem? Make a note in the margins and move on? give up and read Boccaccio instead?
In the Universe in which Adam Roberts lives, an anti-real universe, “universalis civilitas humani generis” can mean only one thing: rightist, statist, fascist rulership.
In the Universe in which I live, a fellow from Trier by the name of Marx wrote of an ideal, social world-society, a sort of “kommunismus.” In the Universe in which I live, people are considered doltish for calling that arrangement “fascist.” That arrangement prides itself on a type of fairness to all, something about “to their needs” and such. Maybe if this Marx person lived in Roberts’ Universe he’d be a fascist.
This “universalis civilitas humani generis” that was described in Roberts’ Universe, it consisted of a society administered by an individual, on behalf of an entity called “God.” This God person was famous for something called the Beatitudes, a series of statements on who gets preference in His eye. Presumably, the Monarch, only administering on behalf of this God, would be bound by the preferences set forth in those Beatitudes. This is the arrangement Roberts calls fascist, a simple truth in his Universe ("Let’s. . . be done with it"). In my Universe that would be considered contentious (in my Universe, fascists don’t bless the meek, or give them the earth).
Now, despite the fact that there are things that Roberts tells me are true in his Universe, that I know are not in mine, I am still willing to believe certain things he says, and even find them useful and informative. For example, he says, “[I]n the second canto of the Paradiso Beatrice takes Dante to the orb of the moon.” I checked my bookshelf, and that’s true in my Universe too! I can learn things from Roberts’ Universe. I hope he’s willing to learn things from mine, where we are eager to learn from Dante.
First, let me say that we’re in full agreement on the inaccuracy of Dante’s account of the spots on the moon. Let me further say that I am fully united with you in the unequivocal rejection of fascism as a political project.
Now, as for the main point of your post: you admit that Dante’s universe is internally consistent. Indeed, it is a marvellous intellectual production. We’ve stopped believing in the presuppositions that underlie its physical descriptions of the world, but it has not come undone for all that—and if we switch our perspective from a factual to a poetic one, we can admire the work as something that was lovingly and exquisitely made.
This use of his text was not Dante’s intention when he wrote it. We’re in a position now to know that it doesn’t actually work in the way that Dante intended it to—but it does work as poetry (particularly if we locate the implicit declaration “This is totally true” inside the poetic production itself). Using it as poetry (and therefore focusing on the Inferno and Purgatorio at the expense of the much more boring Paradiso) is to some extent a reinvention of the poem, or arguably even a betrayal of Dante’s intention. But I’d rather betray Dante’s intention than be deprived of his poem.
Finally, your jump to politics is completely unwarranted. An unappealling political opinion and a factual error are not the same thing, are they?
Thinking back (and perhaps saving you some typing), I realize that you’re briding the gap from factual error to politics by referring to Dante’s unappealing moral hierarchy. That does make your position more defensible, though still ultimately (to use one of your favorite words) wrong.
Yet Dante expects us to take as wholly “ficitional” the following story: that he took a grand tour of hell, purgatory, and heaven, guided by the poet Virgil and by Beatrice, the spirit of a young girl of which he was once enamoured. His story is an outright fiction. ( I don’t know what word he would have used for “fiction.”???) I’m sure he assumed that those three places really existed, but certainly he wouldn’t have been certain of what the various inhabitants would have to say to him. He must have been conscious of inventing all the details, all of the actual events at the literal level of his allegory. So the problem is not with the truth claims of his story: “I went to hell and here is what I saw,” but with the truth claims of his moral theology: “this is my hierarchy of moral goodness and depravity.”
One might as well complain to Aesop that foxes don’t really have converstions with crows.
For exactly the reasons you name, I have never been able to enjoy the Divine Comedy. Perhaps my feelings about it would be different if I could read it easily in Italian; or if there were really beautiful translations out there; perhaps then I could enjoy it as “poetry” without regard to its truth. (Perhaps). As it is, I have had to read it as “fantasy” (just as you seem to recommend). But as such it is more like 1984 to me than like Tolkien. Just imagine: men in Purgatorio carry haeavy weights in order that they may not turn their faces away from religious base-reliefs on the ground which instruct them in faith. As they become purified, they can gradually straighten up, thus paying less and less attention to art. This vision of art—as device for delivering messages and something to be discarded and “transcended” I find too much to bear, more so perhaps than the fascist messages you detect in Dante.
My thanks to dunno for reminding us that Marx is essentially a religious thinker.
I think Roberts would reply that it’s ok to say that to Aesop:
Some might consider it infra dig to bracket Tolkien and Dante together, since the one writes elevated poetry and the other populist prose, but I can’t agree with that. It seems to me increasingly apparent that Tolkien’s big book is one of the most significant pieces of fiction of the last century. More to the point, perhaps, is Tolkien’s explicit and ‘cordial’ dislike of allegory; the textual strategy which Dante inhabits more fully, more complexly, than most.
Robert likes Tolein better because “[h]e eschews allegory because the world in which we live is not allegorical; because Christ is an incarnation, not an allegory, of God.” Now this is problematical. Dante wrote in allegory because God talked in allegory (flip open the Book of Matthew to a random page). Tolkien did not write in allegory because a person is not also a narrative structure ("Christ is an incarnation").
That seems like an odd excuse to prefer one author to another (or one narrative form to another, especially if you’re using the “good enough for God” argument Roberts attributes to Tolkien, against God’s own speech pattern).
dunno writes: “In the Universe in which I live, a fellow from Trier by the name of Marx wrote of an ideal, social world-society, a sort of “kommunismus.””
Ruled, as Adam Roberts points out, “under a single unitary secular leader.” Right? Hmm, maybe this is not such a good analogy.
dunno: “Presumably, the Monarch, only administering on behalf of this God, would be bound by the preferences set forth in those Beatitudes. This is the arrangement Roberts calls fascist, a simple truth in his Universe”
Theocratic rule under a single person generally is called theofascism, yes, no matter what its claims towards enforcing God’s will.
dunno: “That seems like an odd excuse to prefer one author to another (or one narrative form to another”
I didn’t read any such claim.
Rich.
“Under a single unitary secular ruler” meant something different before concepts of Deism and separation of church and state. It’s safe to assume that Dante was not defending a ruler who would flaunt religious requirements. (Another way to put it: Edward the Confessor, the saint, was a secular ruler). As I might have phrased it in my first comment, “In my Universe time flows in one direction and a fourteenth-century person is not assumed to be using a definition of ‘secular’ that first appeared in the eighteenth century.”
In regards to theofascism, my point was not that Dante somehow got it right (he didn’t). My point is that when other people that we are more disposed to like (Marx) present utopias that are utterly unobtainable, and by their nature (a nature not too dissimilar from Dante’s ideal) likely to devolve into despotism, we are not so eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If we can approve of some of Marx (who claims also to be so very right), while knowing about mid-twentieth century China, then Roberts should let us approve of some of Dante, while knowing about early fourteenth century Spain.
As to your last two paragraphs, your elision is admirable. You imply my “That” was a a statement of preference for theocracy. What I said was (and you can check if you don’t believe me):
Dante wrote in allegory because God talked in allegory (flip open the Book of Matthew to a random page). Tolkien did not write in allegory because a person is not also a narrative structure ("Christ is an incarnation").
That seems like an odd excuse to prefer one author to another (or one narrative form to another, especially if you’re using the “good enough for God” argument Roberts attributes to Tolkien, against God’s own speech pattern).
I said that in an entirely different comment, about an entirely different part of Roberts’ post. If you disagree with me on reading Tolkien and Dante side by side, that’s fine, say so. But I would appreciate it if you did not shred my comments to make your straw man.
I apologize for the error in my previous post. It sould read “early fifteenth century Spain.”
That’s not what I meant by my last two paragraphs at all. I took your statement to be a claim that Adam Roberts wrote that he prefers Tolkien to Dante, or one narrative form to another. He wrote neither of those things.
“In regards to theofascism, my point was not that Dante somehow got it right (he didn’t).”
But Adam’s point, as I understand it, is Dante chose to bind up his various forms of truth-claims with each other. Therefore if he is wrong on some, all of them suffer, and we are forced to read his work in a completely different sense than he intended.
“My point is that when other people that we are more disposed to like (Marx) present utopias that are utterly unobtainable, and by their nature (a nature not too dissimilar from Dante’s ideal) likely to devolve into despotism, we are not so eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
Actually, I think that we are, for most values of “we”. My point was that you were saying that we don’t call Marx’ utopia fascist, despite it being a utopia. That is because it doesn’t have a single unitary ruler, among other things, not because we necessarily think it would work out well.
This isn’t a new debate. Renaissance editions of Dante bounced between heavily annotated versions and editions with no commentary at all. Some wanted Dante the Theologian, others wanted Dante the poet.
See: http://www.italnet.nd.edu/Dante/text/Introduction.html
I’m reaching way, way back to an undergraduate honors seminar devoted to Dante, but isn’t it critical commonplace to distinguish between Dante the Pilgrim and Dante the Poet? I say this not to undermine Adam’s fantastic post, but to complicate it. We assume that Dante, a Catholic, believed in the literal truth of his spiritual journey; but we only do that because he’s a Catholic. Whereas we don’t question the inviolability of Tolkien’s worldview(s) because there’s no precedent for thinking that his fictional one corresponds with his actual. (Hence his pouty insistence that it’s not Not NOT about WWI or WWII.) Tolkien wants his fictional creation treated as a New Critical object, wholly distinct from the world in which it was created. And he has more of a case for that than, say, an Agrarian poet with an Agrarian agenda. But that doesn’t mean it’s wholly inviolable. Same with Dante, no? We can make these hard and fast distinctions, disallow Dante the Poet liberties in his depictions of Dante the Pilgrim, but it seems an odd move given what we know about how Catholics felt about the Catholic worldview...and I had a point, but I seem to have lost it halfway through the journey of my life.
Any force that Adam’s post has, it has only because he has managed to overlook the single most important fact about Dante’s poem: it is an allegory. (Adam acknowledges this, of course, but only to dismiss its importance.) The Inferno is not a poem which seeks to describe Hell: it is a poem which seeks to describe sin via the image of Hell. Likewise, Purgatorio is the vehicle through which Dante describes sanctification, and Paradise that through which he describes the state of blessedness. The “places” of the poem are allegories of spiritual states which people experience, to some degree and in a mixed way now, but completely after we die. Dante believed in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but that doesn’t mean that his poem is meant to describe them.
So Adam’s frustration with Dante’s placing of some people lower, and others higher, than Adam would place them is totally misbegotten. Pause to think about this for one minute: does anyone really believe that Dante thought that each person in Hell is guilty of one sin and one sin only? Dante’s placing of people in certain circles has nothing — literally nothing — to do with where Dante thinks that that person might actually spend Eternity. (Dante knows perfectly well how presumptuous such judgments would be: he knows that all those fellow Florentines whom he consigns to the Inferno — one of them while still, to all appearances, alive! — may well be among the “late repentant” who he places at the foot of the mountain of Purgatory, among the redeemed.) The people, rather, take their places in the poem in order to provide vivid illustration of what Dante is primarily concerned to represent, which is the character of certain sins and virtues.
So Adam has quite thoroughly misunderstood what Dante is representing and the literary/mimetic means which is is employing in the task. To say that there is a level of “‘poetic’ or allegorical truth” in the poem which is to be distinguished from “other sorts of truth” is a colossal blunder. All those “other sorts of truth” are represented through and only through the medium of the allegory. Which means that if “the poem is not, in any simple sense, a fictional work” it is also not in any simple sense a realistic or mimetic work. We need to get this straight before we can have a meaningful conversation about what the poem affirms and whether those affirmations are warranted.
But Adam’s point, as I understand it, is Dante chose to bind up his various forms of truth-claims with each other. Therefore if he is wrong on some, all of them suffer, and we are forced to read his work in a completely different sense than he intended.
Here you get to the reason I was comparing Dante to Marx. Not to say that they are both fascist, but to say that they both present utopias for which they claim beneficial effects, but which fall short. Now I don’t particularly mind dinging Dante for being so very wrong about what his utopia does; I just think that if we do so, we should not peg him any more than we do Marx. I would like to place a restraint on our urge to devalue his writings.
I would not be surprised. In Chaucer the distinction is between Chaucer the poet and “Geffrey” (no “o"), the pilgrim/narrator/&c. It’s a vital distinction in that case, because Geffrey’s a real dolt. He’s a moron. (But he has the same biography as Geoffrey Chaucer). He gets made fun of mercilessly in Book I of The House of Fame, and he demonstrates his horrific storytelling skills when his turn comes up in the Cantebury Tales. Confusing him with Chaucer the author would create problems ("That‘s Chaucer’s ideal story?").
For someone who denounces “condescend[ing] to Dante [as a product of] the cultural adolescence of Europe,” Roberts shows a surprising unwillingness to permit him the capacity of reflexivity that we generally grant to authors.
Roberts seems to want to deny Dante reflexivity because his philosophy is religiously-based (just like that of so many other medieval poets). But that’s ridiculous. All philosophies have a tendency to believe that they are right. Christianity is not different in this regard. Saying that Dante’s world is dependent on the reality of his notion of a God is the functional equivalent of saying Faulkner’s world is dependent on the reality of his notion of a Yoknapatawpha County. We are left to ask, “yeah, so?”
Just a brief addendum to illustrate my earlier comment: Attila is placed where he is in order to exemplify bestial rage. The alchemists are where they are, not in the least because they are “labouring away trying to turn base metals into gold,” but because they claim falsely to have achieved that transmutation. So, if we can just remember the allegory for a minute and pay a little less attention to the specific people representing the sins, we can ask ourselves the relevant question: who does more harm in the world, those who unreflectively do violent deeds in fits of anger, or those who calculate to manipulate and deceive?
Um, Alan, you seem to be missing the point here: Dante is wrong.
The alchemists really did turn lead into gold?
Turning up late to my own post’s comment thread. What a dreadful social faux pas; terribly sorry.
Alan: “we can ask ourselves the relevant question: who does more harm in the world, those who unreflectively do violent deeds in fits of anger, or those who calculate to manipulate and deceive?” We can indeed ask this question. And we can answer it by agreeing with Dante that the guy selling dodgy rolexes door-to-door is clearly a much greater sinner than that guy who was in charge during the Mai Lai massacre. On what possible grounds could anybody claim such an answer was untrue?
Actually I agree with Alan: the poem “is also not in any simple sense a realistic or mimetic work. We need to get this straight before we can have a meaningful conversation about what the poem affirms and whether those affirmations are warranted.” It’s realist, I think, only in Auerbach’s specialist sense of ‘realism’. It’s not mimetic in the same way that Zola’s novels are. But ‘literary mimesis’ doesn’t have the sole monopolistic rights on literary truth.
Virgil is chosen as guide not just because Dante thinks the Aeneid a really cool poem; it’s because he stands as the key example of a poet who gets as close as it’s possible to truth whilst still missing the one thing – Christ – that actually determines all truth. This from Teodolina Barolini’s Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy”: ‘Virgil is presented as the author of the greatest historical poem ignorant of the greatest truth of Christian history. For this reason he becomes identified with falsehood, whereas Dante’s poem is ‘quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna’ [Inf. 16, 124].’
Dunno: “Saying that Dante’s world is dependent on the reality of his notion of a God is the functional equivalent of saying Faulkner’s world is dependent on the reality of his notion of a Yoknapatawpha County.” Don’t think so. Faulkner writes fiction; he doesn’t pretend to be writing anything other than fiction. He’s interested in the lie that tells the truth (to quote, uh, V for Vendetta). Dante gives us the truth that tells the truth. This really does strike me, the more I think about it, as a massive and crucial difference. Perhaps it’s just me.
I’m thinking of for instance Carlyle and his inability to see any merit in fiction at all: trying to browbeat Browning into giving up writing poetry and write history instead, because history is, you know, true and lying is morally deplorable. He simply couldn’t see the justification for lying. But this (forgive me for stating the obvious) is one of the really cool things about fiction, one of the reasons why it has Taken Over The World of Literary Art. It is a lie, actually, but being a lie actually frees it up to be truthful in ways that other modes don’t permit.
Scott: “…and I had a point, but I seem to have lost it halfway through the journey of my life.” Ah, yes. This post got spawned by me re-reading the Comedy, and finding myself slipping almost automatically into reader-responses conditioned by all the Fantasy I’ve read, whilst simultaneously having this grit-under-the-eyelid sense that of course you can’t read Dante as if he’s just a superior Robert Jordan. This is not just a question of Dante’s superior artistry but of a fundamentally different aesthetic premise. Or, again: this poem is so thoroughly integrated into discourses of judgment that it can’t help presenting itself to its readers in those terms. Judge my theology! Go on, I dare you! Judge my politics! Judge my physics! Judge the criteria I use to judge! And in that case …
In my ideal world I’d read Dante as fiction, as one of the greatest and most imaginative fictions in Western art, on a par with The Odyssey and LotR. But I don’t know if that’s possible. Which is to say, I don’t know if the text allows such a reading, or whether reading it that way would be too distorting and violent.
Adam K: “Thinking back (and perhaps saving you some typing), I realize that you’re briding the gap from factual error to politics by referring to Dante’s unappealing moral hierarchy. That does make your position more defensible, though still ultimately (to use one of your favorite words) wrong.” Why, thank you for your realization. I do find it hard to see how, or more precisely on what specific criteria (other than readerly whim, ‘yeah this bit chimes with my views, no that bit doesn’t’) one separates out the different registers of truthfulness in the poem: the religious, political, aesthetic, scientific, psychoanalytic (or personal, or whatever). But this is part of my larger problem. It’s a shame you let the ‘wrong’ gag go after only one iteration, because it is a good gag, and. Hey, wait… what’s this further on in the comment thread? Um, Alan, you seem to be missing the point here: Dante is wrong. Hah! Excellent. I feel like that US President standing next to the guy made-up to look like him and acting out all the idiocies of the President for a room full of journalists. Hah, you got me there!
Me, I do worry about the term ‘wrong’. But then again, I’m curious about what other people called Adam do when they encounter people who genuinely believe that gravity is caused by rotating shifts of angels in the earth’s core sucking, or who believe that the British Royal Family are actually alien lizards in latex masks, or who believe that the newsreaders are giving them instructions to murder their neighbour. If you can’t call them wrong, then how do you engage with them? If you call them wrong, on what basis do you do so? But I’m getting distracted here.
Justin: “I would be curious to know where The Bible fits into your schema, as it too is a text riddled with factual errors that nevertheless presents itself as the truth.” Yes, this does interest me. Because it seems to me a mistake to mock or otherwise dismiss that broad group who insist on the absolute literal truth of every word in the Bible. Don’t misunderstand me; they’re clearly wrong to do so. I’m sure Adam K. wouldn’t say so, for that would involve invoking the W-word, but, you know. Nevertheless many of these literalists are intelligent and genuine people, and they have one very good reason for doing as they do, despite the contorpulations into which their position drives them. Because accepting the whole thing as true provides a consistency that picking and choosing from your holy text doesn’t. On what grounds do you decide that loving your neighbour is true and stoning people to death for working on the Sabbath is not true? On your own gut response? On the consensus of a bunch of other people? Do you do so without much thinking about it? It all seems rather rickety. And you do need something to stop the thought ‘this little bit of the Bible isn’t true’ from dominoing through ‘but if this bit is untrue, then what about other bits?’ to ‘the Bible as a whole is untrue’. Perhaps it would be better to say ‘the level of truth in the Bible does not rise above what would be expected by the combination of stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day-ishness and a ‘wisdom of the tribe’ core of common sense. But that’s my sense of it, and might well be wrong.
Dunno: “In the Universe in which Adam Roberts lives…” Sorry, Dunno, you’re breaking up. I think alphawave quantum harmonics are interfering with the communication channels between our two universes.
And we can answer it by agreeing with Dante that the guy selling dodgy rolexes door-to-door is clearly a much greater sinner than that guy who was in charge during the Mai Lai massacre. On what possible grounds could anybody claim such an answer was untrue?
That would be a really snappy comeback, except that it bears no resemblance to the point I made, or to Dante’s organization of Hell. I doubt that anyone has ever thought that every individual act of unreflective violence is less evil than every individual act of deception! — certainly not Dante, who, as I pointed out, is not interested in the game of pigeonholing people like toy soldiers in cigar boxes (Lt. Calley in here, fake Rolex guys over there). Fascinatingly nifty as the notion of “wrongness” is, it’s worthwhile to try paying some attention to what Dante actually wrote: for instance, to see that many of the people whom Dante punishes in the two circles of the fraudulent are also guilty of great acts of violence — indeed, their violence is typically enabled and intensified by their deceptiveness, which is why the fraudulent do more damage in the world than the merely and unreflectively violent. (Do you really think that the only sin of the My-Lai soldiers was that of thoughtless violence? Only forza involved, no froda?)
Again: there’s no way to know whether and how a writer is wrong if you don’t have even a basic understanding of what that writer is affirming. And the same goes for your invocation of “Auerbach’s specialist sense of ‘realism,’” since Auerbach doesn’t have such a sense. He produces an anatomy of representational strategies, among them being Dante’s “figural realism,” and if you understand Auerbach’s elaboration of the concept of figura you’ll have a much better sense of what Dante is affirming and how he affirms it.
I’m sure we can all agree that “‘literary mimesis’ doesn’t have the sole monopolistic rights on literary truth,” but what that has to do with this conversation I can’t see.
Adam Roberts.
In your post, you refer to the Divine Commedy as “creat[ing] a world,” as well as being nonfiction. I figured if you could insist that the Comedy was a nonfiction, but still created a world (that is presumably not this one: you can’t create something that prefigures you), then I should treat your nonfiction as creating a world (I called it a Universe) that is also not this one. If you can assume that Dante’s nonfiction poem sets another world, I thought I’d assume your nonfiction post set another Universe. I was only trying to apply your logic, and apologize if it came across wrong.
I am surprised that, after insisting on the nonfictionality of Dante, further comparison to other authors is limited to authors Roberts acknowledges write fiction. Since Roberts brought in physics in his last post, we ought to begin there.
Newton has a problem. His understanding of gravity is untrue. (Sound familiar?). But yet we still teach Newtonian physics. Scientists still use Newtonian physics in certain circumstances, because there are times when his calculations do provide the right answer, and at those times they are useful because they are simpler to perform. The scientists use Newton at those times knowing that he, like Dante and many other nonfiction writers, was wrong on the grand scale, but his descriptions of how things work are too helpful to discard entirely.
(This is before we even reach the fact that for the terribly religious Newton, his physics “necessarily exist[] underneath the monologic divine. This, we might say, goes without saying; what devout monotheist could do otherwise").
It seems to me to be unfair to insist Dante writes nonfiction, and then knock him for not writing the way Tolkien does, who was, as Roberts points out, not writing about the World Wars.
(and now you’ve made me all grumpy on Monday morning.)
Adam R., I’m not calling into question the possibility of wrongness. That seems to be a leap that has come up often in similar conversations (i.e., I think you’re wrong to apply a scientific view of time to Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations; you respond that apparently it’s impossible for a philosopher to be wrong about something). How could I be rejecting the category of wrongness in the process of declaring you to be wrong about something?
The Bible is not only wrong in terms of modern science—certain texts are wrong in terms of other texts within the Bible itself. And you know what? The people who claim to be “literally” following the Bible are not, because it is impossible to do so (viz., contradictions). Everyone has to make interpretative decisions, even the fundamentalists. The anti-gay stuff is cherry-picked out of Leviticus; prohibitions against mixing fabrics are left out—for example. <i>Claiming</i> literal adherence to scripture is a <i>rhetorical</i> move, meant to put all other Christians on the defensive (and, incidentally, to convince secular people that their “literal” version of Christianity is the most consistent version of Christianity—mission accomplished, apparently!).
It’s actually pretty similar to how you start off these threads claiming to be arguing on behalf of reality itself.
It got cut off: “Claiming literal adherence to scripture is a rhetorical strategy, meant to put all other Christians on the defensive (and, incidentally, to convince secular people that their “literal” version of Christianity is the most logically consistent—mission accomplished, apparently).”
Adam Kotsko: “Um, Alan, you seem to be missing the point here: Dante is wrong.” (complete comment quoted)
Adam Kotsko again: “It’s actually pretty similar to how you start off these threads claiming to be arguing on behalf of reality itself.”
Adam Kotsko, I’ve previously suggested that you should no longer comment on this site. I suggest once again that you leave off and go back to your own blog, where you can engage in your favored modes of “argument” to your heart’s content.
You see, you are writing as you always do, and the discussion has nothing to do with Theory. The problem is not with the subject matter, but with yourself.
Alan: “The people, rather, take their places in the poem in order to provide vivid illustration of what Dante is primarily concerned to represent, which is the character of certain sins and virtues.”
I don’t think that’s complete, and it is incomplete in a way which makes it difficult to understand Adam’s response. The people do not simply represent the character of sins and virtues, they also, and you write later, take their place within a scheme which classifies the sins and virtues according to seriousness or merit. By using Attila to “exemplify bestial rage”, and some fraudulent alchemists further down, there is necessarily some slippage from the classification back to the allegorical people used. You wish to read Dante as only saying “who does more harm in the world, those who unreflectively do violent deeds in fits of anger, or those who calculate to manipulate and deceive?” But Attila did more harm, by our standards, than all the fraudulent alchemists in the world put together. This can not really be abstracted from his value as an allegorical figure; it is part of the small fund of information that “everyone knows” about him, making him work as an allegorical figure in the first place. This becomes a serious aesthetic problem for contemporary readers, unless they can come to terms with the different senses of “wrongness” in Dante in some way. Which is, of course, what Adam R. is trying to do, and which really is more difficult in Dante than in many other factually wrong or morally non-contemporary texts because of the way in which everything in Dante is interlinked.
The case of the Christian Bible really does seem to me to be somewhat different, because of its internal divisions into books, which suggest different authors, different historical times, different points of view. When Dante writes about the Moon and why it has to be how it is, it’s all integrated into why the moral judgements have to be as they are.
Rich, I’m willing to leave our personal dislike of each other aside from now on if you are.
In fact, even if you’re not.
Rich, I agree fully that “Attila did more harm, by our standards, than all the fraudulent alchemists in the world put together,” and I think Dante would also agree. But Dante is not really interested in the question of whether particular people are worse than other particular people. (That’s my problem with Adam’s post: by forgetting the allegorical purposes of the people in the Commedia he sets us of fon a wild goose chase.) Dante’s argument is that habits of deception and fraudulence pave the way for increasingly greater evils and therefore in the very long term can do more damage than even horrific outbursts of mindless violence (as opposed, note, to calculated violence, which almost always comprises fraud as well). Indeed, this is one of the architectonic themes of Gibbon’s history of the Roman empire, in which we can see again and again how deceptive practices which seem relatively innocuous when practiced by certain emperors — especially emperors whom Gibbon sees as basically virtuous, like Diocletian — end up having devastating consequences when continued and extended by less virtuous successors. Gibbon is not like Dante in many respects, but he is in this one: both of them understand that one must make a clear distinction between (a) the character of individual persons and (b) the effects of certain virtues or vices when they are distributed among many people through space or time. So, once more: the question of whether Attila did more harm than any number of fraudulent alchemists is different than the question of whether, overall and universally, bestial violence is less damaging than deception.
The problem for Dante is that this point is not easily representable in narrative: what Attila did is far easier for an artist to show us and for us to recognize than the long-term consequences of deception. Habits of deception can build for a long time “underground” without manifesting themselves in representable action. This is one reason why Gibbon’s favorite adverb is “insensibly” — profound changes are always happening “insensibly” in Gibbon’s narrative, but he’s great at showing how that happens. So maybe the kind of point that Dante wants to make by putting alchemists below tyrants is actually better made in historical narrative than poetic allegory.
Finally: you are right that there is indeed “slippage” between the historical characters Dante includes in his story and the allegorical meaning they contain. But this is because Dante’s figural imagination (to go back to Auerbach) is concerned with how history develops according to a pattern of prefiguration and fulfillment (“from shadowy types to truth”). What the figure of Attila is meant to indicate is the teleology — or, more properly, the eschatology — of bestial violence: the tendency towards violence in anyone is, in germ, the atrocities of Attila. (“A History of Violence,” anyone?)
One point that might be helpful with this problem of allegory is the way in which so many medieval allegories work in the opposite direction (i.e., opposite from Attila the Hun representing a moral problem smaller than the actual enormity of his crimes): characters who are named after particular vices and virtues take on personalities in excess of what they’re supposed to represent. (I’m thinking specifically of Piers Plowman, but there are others.) The “slippage” can happen in both directions.
I have to say I don’t understand the critics who claim the Commedia isn’t fictional. Of course it is. Dante didn’t, as a matter of fact, meet up with the shade of Virgil while trying to escape from allegorical beasts at the age of thirty five. He didn’t, as a matter of fact, descend into hell and have conversations with the people he found there. In particular, he held no conversation with Ulysses, who was already a fictional character, invented by an earlier poet.
Every word in the Commedia is a lie, precisely as Plato said it would be.
The comparison with Madame Bovary is apt. “People are like that.” This is close, I think, to Tolkien’s view of the applicability of (even feined) history. Judge Brack thought, “People don’t do such things.” One of the points of Hedda Gabler is they do. But Hedda herself never existed, never killed herself. And any argument (say for gun control) which assumed that Hedda Gabler was true would be laughed at. You can’t base a case on a fiction.
If you’re permitted to make up the evidence, you can prove anything.
And it’s no good cherry-picking: saying, fleeing from obviously allegorical animals is presented as fictional, but the cosmology is presented as true. Because that’s no test. Remember Eco’s character walking across Paris on a specific day. Except that on that specific day there was a fire. In a fiction, everything is fictional, even that which is presented as real. Naturalmente un manoscritto. Naturally a hole in the ground reaching to the earth’s very center. These are circumstantial details intended to give verisimilitude to a tale. Dante imports “established truths” into his fable; it isn’t his fault they turned out to be false.
jim: “I have to say I don’t understand the critics who claim the Commedia isn’t fictional.”
jim, maybe I’m just not understanding your comment, but I don’t understand this reaction to Adam Roberts’ comment. Dante seems to want to teach us things, or at least cause us to think about morally serious things. And sometimes they aren’t even quite moral per se; when Alan writes about “the long-term consequences of deception”, he seems to be writing about historical consequences, not a moral judgement about whether deception is worse than anger. Jonathan Mayhew writes that the problem is with “the truth claims of his moral theology”, but Alan goes farther than that. But in either case, as Adam Roberts wrote, we can’t just read Dante as if he’s a theologically oriented fabulist, as you seem to suggest, because that’s not what he seems to be trying to do.
Ray Davis, in the response post above, brings up the comparison to hard SF. Well, to use a homely example, there is a certain subgenre of hard SF written by techno-libertarians whose extra-fictional purpose appears to be to convince the reader that technology, if not interfered with, will lead humanity through a quick-development Singularity to a great, utopian future. dunno writes: “I don’t particularly mind dinging Dante for being so very wrong about what his utopia does; I just think that if we do so, we should not peg him any more than we do Marx.” Leaving aside how much people do blame Marx for the failure of his utopian thinking (which I think that people actually do quite a bit), the discrediting of this kind of scenario goes in both directions, both from premise to conclusion and from conclusion to premise. If our understanding of technology was such that we can fairly definitively say that that there would be no fast technological change leading to Singularity, the techo-utopia is discredited. If the techno-utopia fails to occur as scheduled, then we start to doubt the premise, and say that the type of technological change isn’t likely to occur. If the whole thing has embedded observations about e.g. whether deception is worse than anger (libertarians are often ideologically concerned with deception, by the way, in their rejection of “force or fraud"), then those observations are in turn discredited by the failure of the overall “argument” that they are embedded in; the reader can not help but feel that an author that is wrong about an overall schema that they relate everything to must be wrong about details as well. At the last, you’re left with something that is certainly a fiction, just as it always was, but it is a drained, enervated fiction, which devotes most of its energy to a argument that we feel is false.
In the case of Dante, this is very bad, since Dante is not some hack turning out techno-libertarian SF, but rather someone who we should put effort into maintaining our ability to read, even as we learn that his facts were wrong, then disagree with his moral judgement, and finally disbelieve even his details. (The historian Priscus portrays Attila as not at all characterized by bestial rage; his reputation seems to be partly romanticized, partly propaganda.) At the end, Dante is on a system of life support, at least in translation: you have to first explain what people thought of Attila in Dante’s time, then the particular way in which “Dante’s figural imagination [...] is concerned with how history develops”, all in the service of a moral judgement that we disagree agree with on first consideration, and which can only be saved by what seems to be a highly subtle argument that is perhaps not convincing when compared to straightforward arguments about Dante being committed to his symbolic structure.
Too much of this thread appears to be either “don’t touch those life support tubes!” or “Dante’s dead, now we can just read him as a poet”. Adam Roberts is not writing some positivistic tract, as far as I can tell, but presenting a real problem that is different than the standard one of keeping up with the details needed to understand any centuries-old work of art.
Adam Kotsko: “Rich, I’m willing to leave our personal dislike of each other aside from now on if you are.”
Adam Kotsko, it’s not a personal dislike. I don’t like it when you write things like
“Um, Alan, you seem to be missing the point here: Dante is wrong” (a meaningless taunt) or “It’s actually pretty similar to how you start off these threads claiming to be arguing on behalf of reality itself” (a misrepresentation that seeks to find a pattern of misbehavior, so that your annoyance can be built up over multiple instances). It has nothing to do with anything except your evident urge to fight, misdirects conversation, makes other people think twice about commenting, directs attacks at a person rather than at a text, and leads to full-blown disputes when one of your friends decides that you’ve been wronged.
If you don’t want me pointing this out, you can simply stop writing in this way. Until then, please go away. I do the same thing by generally not commenting on blogs where I feel like I’ll just be causing fights all the time (except in cases in which I feel all have been invited to comment, such as the recent symposium), so I’m not asking you to do something that I wouldn’t do.
Rich, Could you state briefly what you take the central problem of Adam R.’s post to be? I agree with you that “saving Dante” requires a huge amount of effort, and I can’t be the only reader who was initially put off by the vast superstructure of annotation that is necessary to even get at the surface level of Dante’s work—diagrams, footnotes, etc. At the same time, I didn’t see that as one of the main complaints that Adam was lodging—obviously he was willing to put in the work and study Dante very closely, or else this post would have been impossible to write. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I’m possibly missing the point (stereotyping him based on past posts, etc.—although this does seem to be part of a series based on the premise of “Great Minds Who Are Wrong"). I’d find it helpful if a more pro-Roberts reader could briefly clarify the point that he’s making here.
Cross-posted—I don’t feel like my latest comment fits the description of the type of behavior you find objectionable. It is a good-faith effort to continue a substantive discussion. If you don’t want to answer, I understand.
Rich,
As I understood Adam’s argument:
Major Premise: The “Commedia is predicated fundamentally upon truth”
Support for Major Premise: Harold Bloom says so; Robin Kirkpatric says so, Singleton says so and generally, “There’s a consensus on this point: Dante’s poem depends upon its truthfulness. It is predicated theologically, aesthetically and morally on the truth. Moreover, it seems clear to me plenty of people, and not just medieval-nostalgic Catholics, think it is true.”
Minor Premise: Here’s an untrue bit. Here’s another.
Conclusion: “in this place in the poem, truth doesn’t matter, [. . .] a proposition radically destructive of Dante’s whole project.”
My reply to this argument is to deny his major.
More generally, I have noticed an occasional tendency to criticise an acknowledged fiction for not being true. And I sort of assimilated Adam’s argument to that tendency (perhaps wrongly).
Fiction isn’t true. That doesn’t make it worse than history. It may make it better, since history often isn’t true, either, but pretends to be.
Dante is a special case since he puts so many “real” people into his fiction and visualizes the cosmology he was told was true. This creates precisely the sort of problem you cite in yo