Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry

4. The Poetry and Poetics of the Creation

4 The Poetry and Poetics of the Creation P I E R O B O I TA N I Dante’s first mention of the Creation in the Commedia is at the beginning of the Inferno, when the protagonist has put the dark wood behind him and finds himself at the foot of the hill of virtue, where he is stopped by the leopard of lust. We are immediately given the hour of the day and season of the events about to unfold: a spring morning with the sun in the constellation of Aries, namely, the spring equinox, precisely the time of year when, according to medieval tradition, God had created the universe ; a morning when the sun “montava ’n sù con quelle stelle / ch’eran con lui quando l’amor divino / mosse di prima quelle cose belle” (1.38–40) [was mounting with those stars which were with it when Divine Love first set in motion those fair things]. For one moment, as the sun of this first spring lightens the landscape , external and internal, the terror that had seized Dante in the dark wood seems to give way to hope. Light and hope are shot through with longing, made explicit in the two past tenses of the verbs, enacting the distance between the world’s Beginning and its present. Dante clearly feels this nostalgia for the Beginning as some essential aspect of his own self, a feeling which is both sensual and intellectual. The idea of the beginning of all things allows him, imaginatively, to see and enjoy the sun and stars as “cose belle,” fair things, and not simply “good,” as Genesis has it. This first firmament possesses a pulchritudo of intimate and pristine aesthetics, like the dawn and the aura that the “things” shed on everything surrounding them. 95 What this introductory canto of the Inferno is also doing is attributing the Creation to divine “love,” in an operation both poetic and evangelical . Dante is possibly thinking of Thomas Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where he states that the poet Hesiod, “before the time of the philosophers,” had placed love as “principium rerum.”1 The act of Creation is then envisaged by Dante, following Aristotle, as a first, primordial (“di prima”) impulse to the movement imparted by the Prime Mover to the celestial bodies, setting time and space in motion. The verb “mosse” in line 40 is a precise philosophical term, which, followed by “cose belle,” is also perceived as an effortless gesture, as if God had given a gentle flick at some slender circle of light that nevertheless supported the entire weight of gravity of the universe. Genesis’s “Fiat lux” (1:3) [Let there be light], “fiat firmamentum” (1:6) [Let there be a firmament], and “fiant luminaria” (1:14) [Let there be lights] are thus translated from words into one silent, luminous touch, reflected by the light of the sun and the stars. It is difficult, then, to maintain that Dante has no specific poetics of Creation when these verses begin the wonderful rainbow which is completed in the very last line of Paradiso: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” [the Love that moves the sun and the other stars]. Here, the “desire and will” that Dante speaks of three lines before the end are finally fulfilled by the vision of God, and are directed by that same “love which moves the sun and the other stars”; here, Dante himself becomes, with the “cose belle” of Inferno 1, an object of the Creation—of a Creation in whose end is its new and present Beginning. The rapt poetry of the Creation will return, as we shall see, in the Paradiso, but Dante is too subtle and complex a thinker to remain infatuated by “fair things.” Immediately after their creation, God turned His Hand to something else: to the gates of Hell and the reign of eternal pain, which the lost souls “abandon all hope” on entering (Inf. 3.1–9). The modern world tends to take a dim view of this duality in a God of love; for Dante, however, there is no ambiguity: it is indeed the “divina podestate” (5) [divine power], the Father, the “somma sapïenza” (6) [supreme wisdom], the Son, and the Holy Ghost, defined “primo amore” (6) [primal love],2 which have produced these gates, in a display of both immense power and infinite wisdom and...