Dante’s Fearful Art of Justice by Anthony K. Cassell (review)

REVIEWS ANTHONY K. CASSELL. Dante's FearfulArt of justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. Pp. xiii, 186. $20.00. Basically Cassell considers the nature of the punishments of Dante's damned; more generally his book is an extended meditation on the nature and operations of typological symbolism. Recognizing that the Inferno offers "no hint of any hierarchy of intensity or variance worked out in the seriousness ofpunishment between differing crimes," Cassell seeks to infer from the symbolic details of each episode a logic of punishment that is "exquisitely apt and merited in each discrete case." As he explains his purpose and procedure, "I wanted to discover the pattern which...joined sinner, sin, punishment, and imagey, in each case, into an artistic whole. In order to do so, I attempted to consider each ofthose elements within the cultural context ofDante's age, drawing upon any sensible and applicable means ofgrasping what an educated man ofDante's own time might have made of such perplexities as Farinata's tomb, Bertran's severed head, or Ulysses' tongue of fire. Having deciphered various elements, I tried to understandtheirinterrelationshipsand tofit them into thelarger system of the contrapasso" (pp. 4-5)-that is, the Old Testament scheme of re­ taliatory justice. Seven chapters are given to astute analyses ofthe details offive episodes: those involving Farinata, Pier della Vigna, the Old Man of Crete, Ulysses, and Satan. As Cassell insists, only when we concentrate on each episode, "not in isolation, but in its context in the poem and in the cultural tradition of Christian euhemerism and typology will the meaning of the entire episode become clear" (p. 57). Cassell is especially determined to deflate what he calls the "romantic positivistic" interpretations of Ulysses and della Vigna. To do this he draws heavily upon extratextual details to reveal what lies beneath the Inferno's literal or narrative level, particularly upon the writings of patristic biblical commentators, medieval moralizers and mythographers, and-most impressively-upon "other 'visual' Chris­ tian sources, art, iconography, liturgy, and extra-liturgical drama, where each seemed to apply when carefully tested against the text" (p. 8). For example, Cassell's discussion of the Farinata episode begins with a consideration of how Dante's citta dolente is informed by Augustine's civitas terrena, an appropriate association for the heresiarchs who ignored the heavenly city while on earth. The canto's multiple references to the civic disorder caused by Guelph and Ghibelline factionalism underline the 173 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER inevitable result of the heresiarchs' refusal to submit to heavenly com­ mands while attempting to build, instead, a personal empire on earth. But thefutilityof such anundertakinghas justbeendramatizedin cantos 9 and 10 by the angelic messenger's ease in vanquishing the defenders of the city of fire. Heresy, for Dante and for the contributors to the tradition which Cassell draws upon, is eminently a civic offense, as the details of the episode suggest. Likewise, the details of Farinata's appearance and bearing emphasize his soul's persistence in his sin and so justify his placement in hell rather than in purgatory. Farinata's "stiffneck" associates him with the most famous of biblical and patristic injunctions against "the unrepentant obstinacy of overheated, overweening, and obdurate unbelief" (p. 19); his eloquence opens him to further suspicion, for the inquisitors of Dante's day saw this as the heresiarch's means of seducing others to unorthodox belief. Appropri­ ately, the heretics are only one of five groups in hell whose punishment involves fire, in their case symbolizing what Saint Gregory the Great calls the overardency of heretics to be wise, which leads them to "study to have heated wits beyond what needs" (sic, p. 21). Their possession of foresight but ignorance of the present state of affairs in Florence is an ironic reversal of their concentration on present matters when alive and blindness to the need to prepare for the afterlife. The heresiarchs' punishment thus pre­ cisely reflects the nature oftheir sin, as well as manifests the nature oftheir guilt: by refusing to repent, the sinners have rejected the New Testament law of grace and so are punished under the Old Testament law of exact retribution. They arise...