For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

There is no more dramatic example of authorial ambivalence than Dante's relationship to Virgil in the Commedia. One the one hand-and from the very opening canto of the Inferno-Virgil is proclaimed to be not only the glory and light of other poets but the pilgrim's personal master and author. It is from his work alone that Dante says he has taken his bello stilo: "tu se' solo colui da cu'io tolsi / lo bello stilo ehe m'ha fatto onore" (Inferno 1.86-87; "You alone are he from whom I took the fair style that has done me honor"). This singular indebtedness is registered canto after canto, as both pilgrim and poet quite literally follow in Virgil's beloved footsteps. Especially in the Inferno, borrowings from the Aeneid are so abundant that it is impossible to escape the fact that the Commedia is constructed out of its narratives, personae, metaphors, and imperial dream. Dante builds his authority, as well as his authorship, by openly imitating I'altissimo poeta (Inferno 4.80), the loftiest poet of Latinity.1

On the other hand, we are increasingly reminded as the poem unfolds that Virgil's power, both as guide and as text, is severely limited. The Aeneid may offer Dante a blueprint for his vernacular poem, but the more one scrutinizes Virgil's influence, the more it is evident that the ancient plan is altered, edited, revised, or refuted outright. Just as Virgilio dolcissimo patre (Purgatorio 30.50; "Virgil sweetest father") is sent back to Limbo upon completing his mission-sent, that is, to the Elysian Fields of Aeneid 6 transformed into the first circle of hell-so the textual precursor of the Commedia is likewise dispatched, all but consumed by Dante's strong reading of it.

Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" gives us a neo-Freudian mythology for understanding the forces at play here. Dante the vernacular newcomer knows the Aeneid tutta quanta (Inferno 20.114), completely and by heart; yet for all the piety that the ephebe officially shows his maestro, he can strike out on his own only if he overcomes his father's magisterial accomplishment by rewriting it on his own terms. Dante's wholesale "misprision" of the Aeneid, therefore, is precisely the mark of his originality; his assault on the parent text makes his poetry possible.2

A more fruitful model for thinking about this relationship, however, may be found in traditional Christian exegesis of the Old Testament, which Bloom speaks of as the most "outrageous" misreading in all of Western civilization.3 In this light, Virgil's text, like the Hebrew Bible, is a scripture that holds the promise of salvation. But in order for it to function in this way, it must be read (or "misread," in Bloom's sense) according to a particular hermeneutic that is both external and posterior to the text itself-a later as well as a new angle of vision. The locus classicus here is 2 Corinthians 3, where Paul, in contrasting tablets of stone with the fleshly heart, presents himself as one of those who have been made ministers of the latter-that is, of the "new testament" ("nos fecit ministros novi testamenu"; v. 6). Using the example of a veiled Moses descending from Mount Sinai after receiving the Decalogue (Exodus 33.29-35), Paul talks about the need for christological understanding to "open up" the Law and the Prophets to their interior, spiritual meaning. Biblical interpretation is meant to remove the veil that restricts the reader to the literal surface of the text and therefore keeps him or her at a remove from its true meaning. Those who persist in a literal reading of the Old Testament refuse to discard the veil and discover what lies within; they stay with the opaque and obsolete, in effect choosing to be sight impaired. By contrast, those who have "eyes that see" come by the grace of the Holy Spirit to apprehend the ancient text at a depth and toward a purpose that before was unknowable. In this way, the Old Testament for Christian readers is born again, with both text and reader transfigured a claritate in claritatem (v. 18), from glory to glory.4

Dante may well have had this Pauline exegesis of the Hebrew Bible in mind when he imagined the encounter between Virgil and Statius in Purgatorio 21-22. The extended passage is a hermeneutical thicket, a densely allusive consideration of writers, texts, readers, and the high stakes of literary interpretation.5 Over the course of two cantos Statius reveals all that Virgil-as poetic figure and as text-means to him. In the first instance, he identifies the author of the Aeneld as the creative source of his entire vocation as a writer:

The sparks which warmed me from the divine flame whereby more than a thousand have been kindled were the seeds of my poetic fire: I mean the Aeneid, which in poetry was both mother and nurse to me-without it I had achieved little of worth. (21.94-99)

Understandably, these lines are often taken as Dante's own accolade-his covert acknowledgement of the seminal influence of Virgil as poetic father, mother, and wet nurse (nutrice). Indeed, this celebration recalls an earlier passage in the opening recognition scene of Inferno 1, in which the pilgrim praises Virgil as a fountainhead overflowing with linguistic power ("quella fonte / che spandi di parlar si largo fiume"; Inferno 1.79-80). Statius in effect builds on the pilgrim's initial compliment, but turns the fountain of inspiration into a poetic fire that "disseminates" its flame and causes a textual conflagration. In either panegyric, the gratitude expressed is elemental and organic, replete with the double sense of Virgil's paternal insemination and maternal nurture.6