From the Tree to the Labyrinth (52 page)

12
. “For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect” (Matt. 24:24). “And then if any man shall say to you, Lo, here is Christ; or lo, he is there; believe him not: For false Christs and false prophets shall rise, and shall shew signs and wonders to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect” (Mark 13:21–22). “Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time” (1 John 2:18); “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:22); “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world” (1 John 4:3).

13
. “And these are the signs of him: his head [is] as a fiery flame, his right eye shot with blood, his left [eye] blue-black, and he hath two pupils. His eyelashes are white, his lower lip is large; but his right thigh slender; his feet broad, his great toe is bruised and flat. This is the sickle of desolation” (
The Testament of Our Lord,
translated into English from the Syriac with Introduction and Notes by James Cooper, D.D. and Arthur John Maclean, M.A., F.R.G.S., Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1902, 1, 11. Available online from the Cornell University library:
http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924029296170/cu31924029296170_djvu.txt
.

“He is small, with thin legs, tall, a tuft of grey hair on his bald forehead, his eyebrows reach to his ears, he has a mark of leprosy on the back of his hand. He will change his shape in front of those who see him: at one time he will be a young man, at another an old man” (Apocalypse of Elijah 3:15–17 [third century]). “His face has a dark look, his hair is like the heads of arrows, his forehead is scowling, his right eye is like the morning star and his left like that of a lion. His mouth is a cubit broad, his teeth a span in length and his fingers are like sickles. His footprints are two cubits long and on his forehead is written: Antichrist” (Apocalypse of Saint John the Theologian [fifth century]).

It is uncertain whether Beatus was familiar with a tenth-century fragment in a manuscript from the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel: “His disciples said to Jesus: “Lord, tell us how to recognize him.” And Jesus said to them: “He will be nine cubits tall. He will have black hair gathered like an iron chain. He will have in his forehead an eye that shines like the dawn. His lower lip will be thick and he will have no upper lip. The little finger of his hand will be the longest, his left foot broader. His posture similar.”

He certainly knew Irenaeus of Lyon: “But when this Antichrist shall have devastated all things in this world, he will reign for three years and six months, and sit in the temple at Jerusalem; and then the Lord will come from heaven in the clouds, in the glory of the Father, sending this man and those who follow him into the lake of fire; but bringing in for the righteous the times of the kingdom, that is, the rest, the hallowed seventh day” (
Against Heresies,
V, 30, 4. Available online at
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103530.htm
.

7

Dante between Modistae and Kabbalah

In his
De vulgari eloquentia
(hereinafter
DVE
)
,
to explain the existence of a plurality of languages, Dante sticks to the letter of the biblical account in Genesis, which he knew in the Latin text of the Vulgate. So we must stick to the Vulgate too, setting aside any philological concerns regarding its fidelity to the original Hebrew. In any case, as we shall see, Dante occasionally strays, with the highhandedness we have come to expect of him, even from the text of the Vulgate.

If the
DVE
is a treatise on language and speech acts, Genesis offered Dante many examples of primal “speech acts.” The first thing we must agree on, however, is what “speaking” means. Certainly, every sign—as Augustine had already remarked—is something perceptible to the senses that serves to bring to mind something different from itself, but this definition (which could also refer to the knot I tie in my handkerchief to remind me of a task I must do) does not yet imply a communicative relationship articulated between two subjects. Rosier-Catach (2006) sees this communicative aspect underscored instead by definitions like the one in Calcidius’s Latin translation of the
Timaeus,
later echoed by Thomas Aquinas (“ut Plato dicit, sermo ad hoc datus est nobis ut cognoscamus voluntatis indicia” [“As Plato says, speech was given to us so we could know signs of others’ wills”],
De veritate
9, 4, 7).
¹
If Dante understood a speech act in this way, then we ought not to say that God “speaks” when he pronounces the
fiat lux,
as a result of which “there was light” (Gen. 1:3–4);
²
and the same could be said for other similar expressions used in the course of creation. Here God seems instead to know “how to do things with words,” bringing into play a magic, operative, performative quality of the word—thus setting a dangerous precedent for all future followers of the occult sciences, convinced they can change the course of events simply by uttering a few para-Hebraic sounds. In the same way it is not clear what God was up to when, for example, He called (“appellavit”) light “day” and darkness “night,” seeing that He had no need to communicate those names to anyone, least of all Himself.

Dante is nonetheless aware of the fact that the Bible often speaks in a figurative way, and he does not make these divine “words” the object of his reflection, considering that, as far as he is concerned, it is evident that the gift of speech has been conferred on man alone (“patet soli homini datum fuisse loqui,”
DVE
I, ii, 8). As he will repeat on a number of occasions, the ability to speak belongs only to mankind: the angels don’t have it (they are gifted with an “ineffable intellectual ability,” which allows each of them to understand the thought of all the others, or, alternatively, all of them read the thoughts of all the others in the mind of God) and the demons (who are already reciprocally aware of the depths of their own perfidy) don’t have it either. And—we may add—if the angels have no use for speech, the same is even truer of God when He was creating the universe.

It is the intention of the
DVE,
therefore, to deal solely with human speech, inasmuch as man is guided by his reason, which in single individuals assumes different forms of judgment and discernment, and requires a faculty that will permit the speaker to transmit an intellectual content through signs perceptible to the senses, in a relationship between sound and sense that he can recognize (in accordance with tradition)
ad placitum,
in other words, as conventionally agreed upon.
³

Nevertheless, Dante still has to explain the episode recounted in Genesis 2:16–17, when the Lord speaks to man for the first time, placing at Adam’s disposal all the resources of the Earthly Paradise, and commanding him not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Clearly, what we have here is an initial act of communication, which would contradict the idea that man was the first to use language. Dante gets out of this by affirming that the fact that God communicated something to Adam does not mean that He did so verbally, but (and this traditional idea comes from Psalm 148: “fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command” [“ignis grando nix glacies spiritus procellarum quae faciunt verbum eius”—the verb “faciunt” in the Vulgate is ambiguous and could mean “that do his word” or “that make up his word”]) He could have expressed himself through atmospheric phenomena, such as thunderclaps and lightning.

Having clarified these issues, Dante might at this point have discussed how Adam spoke when the Lord (Gen. 2:19) formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name (“omne enim, quod vocavit Adam animae viventis, ipsum est nomen eius”). Curiously enough, this role of Adam as nomothete (with the tremendous problem, touched on in Plato’s
Cratylus,
and which will obsess the coming centuries, that is, on what basis did Adam name the animals—with the names
due
to them because of their natures or with those that he himself arbitrarily chose to assign,
ad placitum
) is ignored by Dante. Nor is that all. Disregarding the fact that, in order to name the animals, Adam must have spoken in some way, Dante confesses to being perplexed by the fact that “according to what it says at the beginning of Genesis” the first to speak was the “most presumptuous” Eve (“mulierem invenitur ante omnes fuisse locutam” [“we find that a woman spoke before anyone else”]
DVE
I, iv, 3), when she engaged in dialogue with the serpent, and he finds it unbecoming that such a noble act of the human race should have emerged, not from the lips of a man but from those of a woman (“inconvenienter putatur tam egregium humani generis actum non prius a viro quam a femina profluxisse” [“it may be thought unseemly that so distinguished an action of the human race should first have been performed by a woman rather than a man”]
DVE
I, iv, 3, p. 9).

In fact, this observation (apart from the puzzling display of antifeminism on the part of a poet who sang the praises of a
donna angelicata
or a mortal woman glorified as an angel)—if we exclude the doubtful “words” attributed to God, Adam is the first to speak—first of all when he names the animals, and then when he expresses his satisfaction with the appearance of Eve. Indeed, in the latter case, an entire utterance of his is cited for the first time: “dixitque Adam hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis et caro de carne mea haec vocabitur virago quoniam de viro sumpta est” (“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man”). Mengaldo (1979: 42) suggests that, since for Dante people speak to externalize the thoughts in their minds, and speech is therefore a dialogical phenomenon, what Dante meant to say was that what we have between Eve and the serpent is the first
dialogue,
and hence the first
linguistic act
expressed through the physical production of meaningful sounds. Which would lead us to believe that when Adam is pleased with the appearance of Eve and “says” what he says, maybe he says it to himself, and that (but perhaps we are overmodernizing Dante) the naming of the animals ought not to be considered a linguistic act but a mere metalinguistic foundation.

However we may wish to interpret this liberty that Dante takes as a reader of the Bible, Mengaldo’s suggestion nonetheless prompts us to clarify what a
linguistic act,
as distinct from a language, meant for Dante, in other words to ask ourselves whether or not there is in Dante a critical awareness of the difference (to use the Saussurean terminology) between
langue
and
parole.

Tendentious though he may be in the episode involving Eve, Dante is keen to defend his conviction that Adam ought to have been the first one to speak. And, despite the fact that the first sound uttered by human beings is usually a cry of pain, Adam’s first utterance could only be a cry of joy and at the same time an act of homage to his creator. Therefore, Adam’s first utterance must have been the name of God,
El
(
DVE
I, iv, 4, p. 9).

Confronted with this first linguistic act in human history, Dante must now come to grips with the issue he had proposed to deal with at the very beginning of the
DVE,
precisely because the plurality of languages confirmed by his experience finds its foundation and explanation in Genesis 11:1 and following. The story is a familiar one: after the Flood “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech,” but pride led mankind to vie with God and to construct a tower whose top might reach unto heaven, and the Lord, to punish their pride and prevent the construction of the tower, decides to confuse their languages.

It is true that in Genesis 10, speaking of the spreading abroad of the sons of Noah after the Flood, it is said: “By these [the sons of Japhet] were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations” (10:5), and in almost the same words the concept was repeated for the sons of Ham (10:20) and the sons of Shem (10:31). This hint of a plurality of languages existing before Babel will prove a sticking point, not only for many interpreters of the Bible but also for the Utopians of the Perfect Language (see Eco 1993, English trans. 1995b). But Dante does not consider these passages.

He is clearly convinced that before the building of the Tower of Babel there existed a perfect language, which Adam had used when talking to God, and with which he had spoken to his descendants, and that the plurality of languages had come about only after the
confusio linguarum
or confusion of tongues. Demonstrating a knowledge of comparative linguistics exceptional in his day, Dante shows how the various languages that sprang from the confusion multiplied in a ternary fashion, first according to a division among the various parts of the world, then, within the area that today we would define as Romance, they split up into
langue d’oc, langue d’oil,
and
lingua del sì.
The last-named, the language spoken in Italy, has become further fragmented into a plurality of dialects that sometimes, in Bologna for example, vary from one quarter of the city to another. This is because man is a mutable animal in customs, habits, and languages, over the course of both time and space.

Dante’s project for devising a more decorous and illustrious language (what he calls the
volgare illustre
) for the whole of Italy is to proceed to a critique of the various regional vernaculars, given that poets have always tended to keep a certain distance from the local dialect. His aim is to identify a vernacular that is
illustrious
(a bearer of light),
cardinal
(that functions as a cornerstone [
cardine
] for all the others),
aulic
or
regal
(worthy of its place in the palace of a national kingdom), and
curial
(the language of government, of the law courts, of instruction). This vernacular represents a kind of ideal rule that the best poets have come more or less close to, and by whose standards the existing vernaculars are to be judged.