Walking With Dante

Dante the pilgrim has claimed that indeed he is the one who is inspired by love, who writes what love breathes into him and then makes meaning from that.

Bongiunta is not finished with that discussion. Instead, he goes on to name this inspiration the "sweet new style" (or the "dolce stil novo"), thereby igniting over seven hundred years of commentary and controversy.

And Bonagiunta himself seems to throw some fuel on that fire, given...

After Forese Donati has pointed out five of the gluttons on the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory, one of them, the first mentioned and a poet of the previous generation, keeps muttering something almost unintelligible under his breath.

Our pilgrim asks him for more information. He then offers the pilgrim an oblique prophecy that has troubled Dante scholars for hundreds of years. He also asks if this pilgrim is the same guy who wrote...

Forese Donati continues to answer Dante the pilgrim's questions by naming five penitent gluttons surrounding them on the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory.

As he points them out, Forese (and Dante the poet behind him) use culinary and gastronomical imagery to reinforce the themes of the terrace and perhaps to further fuel that long-standing feud between French and Italian cuisine.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we pick through the histo...

PURGATORIO, Canto XXIV, is set as a direct continuation from Canto XXIII. The poet Dante cues us to the continuation but there nevertheless are a couple of subtle disruptions.

For one thing, Virgil has been silence for most of Canto XXIII and will indeed remain silent throughout Canto XXIV, his longest silence yet in COMEDY. We won’t hear anything from him until well into Canto XXV.

And in this on-going conversation with Forese Donat...

Forese Donati has finished his diatribe about Florentine women and is now ready to hear Dante the pilgrim's story. Who did the pilgrim get here in the flesh?

The pilgrim retells the journey, renegotiating its opening and reconfiguring its theology, even this high up on the mountain, as we near the apocalyptic climax of PURGATORIO.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we walk slowly through this last passage in Canto XXIII.

If you'd like to he...

Having praised his wife, Nella, Forese Donati launches into the prophetic voice, the new "high style" that Dante has developed, a screed with a lyrical undertow.

This complicated poetic act can only be accomplished with the vernacular, with medieval Florentine (in Dante's case).

And although it fuses with misogyny and xenophobia, it nonetheless demonstrates the Dante's new style beyond love sonnets: the lyrical, prophetic voice.

Join ...

Dante the pilgrim and his rival/friend/fellow poet Forese Donati continue to talk about their concerns: suffering, placement on the mountain, and the role of the living in the service of the dead.

Along the way, they seem to be coming closer and closer to the Christian idea of redemptive suffering, a complex stance in the face of the nihilism that almost overwhelms the suffering in INFERNO behind us.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we ...

Having met his poetic rival, Forese Donati, Dante the pilgrim must make sense of the clear and present pain he sees in friend's face.

This passage is a curious example of felix culpa, the fortunate fall, in which suffering must be reinterpreted for the greater good. Except the pain doesn't stop being the pain. Suffering remains the central metaphysical question of the human condition, the experiential crux underneath our high-minded...

Dante now walks with the skeletal gluttons who have God's writing on their faces.

Along the way, there are increasingly complex and almost gaming literary references that litter the text until Dante the pilgrim suddenly is recognized by a fellow, contemporary, vernacular poet who is not known for any high style but is instead a champion of a low, vulgar poetry in this hip, new form of the sonnet.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look ...

Our pilgrim must move beyond the mystical tree on the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory. So he sets off behind Virgil and Statius, only to overtaken by a group of cadaverous, skeletal penitents, whose hollow eyes watch the pilgrim's slower journey.

This passage is an interesting set of problems: low stylists which end up with Ovidian references, all tied up in the very real medieval problem of starvation.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as ...

Did Dante think that the characters in Virgil's and Statius's poems were real? Did he believe that the characters who changed shape, being, and even substance in Ovid's METAMORPHOSES were actual and historical?

This complicated questioning has no final answer . . . which means it can drive most of us modern, post-scientific-revolution people nuts?

But it all goes back to Dante's relationship with his own primary text, the Bible? He d...

Virgil and Statius begin to trek around the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory but are stopped by an upside-down tree . . . that causes more questions than it provides answers.

A voice in the tree warns them off and offers examples of temperance, of moderate appetites, all of which are strange interpretations of Biblical stories that don't necessarily have to do with gluttony.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look at some of the final m...

Our pilgrim, Virgil, and Statius arrive on the otherwise empty sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory. Virgil seems more hesitant. And our pilgrim, Dante, more passive, as he listens to the two older, wiser poets discuss the craft of poetry.

This passage represents the paradox of circularity and linearity, of stasis and advancement, that is the major structural (and thematic!) tension in COMEDY.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we work through...

At the end of their first conversation, Virgil and Statius reconstruct limbo. They transform it into a neighborhood where all the lost, classical writers live.

They also transfer limbo's sighs from the damned to the poet Dante and potentially to his reader. Where have these great authors gone?

And if their texts are one way to God, how many ways to redemption have then been lost with them?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for the ironic and ...

Statius finally tells Virgil what we all want to know: the story of his conversion. How did this Latin poet who dedicated his great epic to a Roman emperor become a Christian.

Through a long process and by subterfuge. Statius was a closeted or hidden (or to use the medieval Florentine term, "closed") Christian.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look through this passage in which Dante the poet attempts to justify putting this pagan Rom...

Given that Statius claims a passage from The Aeneid made him see the error of his ways, Virgil wants to know how this poet of the Thebes could have ever become a Christian, particularly since his poetry shows little evidence of the faith.

Statius replies with some of the most shocking lines in COMEDY: He became a Christian AND a poet because of the damned, pagan Virgil. Virgil's own poetry led Statius to his profession and his confe...

Since we’ve come to a moment of (perhaps!) profound irony as Statius misquotes and even misinterprets Virgil’s AENEID to find his way to salvation, we should perhaps pause and talk a bit about irony, both as an artistic concept and specifically as tool our poet, Dante, uses to make meaning in his text.

In this interpolated (or interstitial?) episode of WALKING WITH Dante, we’ll talk about the two basic forms of irony: simple (or ver...

Statius and Virgil continue their conversation as they climb to the sixth terrace with the pilgrim Dante.

Statius explains that he discovered his error when he read two lines from Virgil's AENEID. The problem is that Statius misquotes these lines and misinterprets them, making them fit his personal situation while pushing them through Aristotle's ethics.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we look at this wild passage that has inspired over...

Blinded by the angel, Dante the pilgrim begins his climb to the sixth terrace of Mount Purgatory. But his plight is overshadowed by Virgil’s desire to know more about Statius . . . in this strange passage of misquotings and misreadings.

The angel cuts short a beatitude from the gospels. Virgil seems to misquote Francesca from INFERNO, Canto V. And Virgil himself seems to toss out Aristotle’s Golden Mean to get what he wants from Sta...