For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia

You, therefore, did lift for me the covering that was hiding the great good that I tell of.

It was Virgil, therefore, who rolled away the stone that formerly had blocked Statius's understanding of God. Through the words of the Eclogue, he in effect pried open the sepulchral slab (coperchio) that had sealed off the Gospel; in so doing, he opened Statius to the "great good" he had not otherwise been able to find. It does not seem to matter that Virgil lived in the time of the "false and lying gods" (Inferno 1.72), in ignorance of the message that lay concealed in his own lines. His pagan text was now to be definitively understood as Christian prophecy and the Eclogue's "old testament" delivered from its obscurity, brought into the light of a "new" day.

The connection I am suggesting between how Dante read Virgil and the way traditional Christian exegetes interpreted the Old Testament is borne out by the patristic and medieval "canonization" of the Eclogue's author, who in many an Advent procession, prophet-play, or iconographic program took his place alongside David, Isaiah, and other Hebrew worthies-all foretellers of Christ.10 Constantine held that when Virgil wrote his poem he knew about the reign of grace that would come with the Virgin Mary's child, but chose instead to express himself covertly. For most others, however, Virgil was believed to be deaf to the good news hidden in his text, blind to its implications. For this reason, Dante has Statius liken him to someone who carries a lantern in the darkness but who holds it behind him to show the way to those who come thereafter: "che porta il lume e se non giova" (22.68). Like Scripture, his words are a light upon the path, but only for those who follow in his wake, in the era of grace, guided by an illumination that Virgil himself was fated never to see.

The image of one who carries a lamp behind him, "qui ehe va di notte / ehe porta il lume dietro e se non giova," is a touching one. It may have come to Dante through Augustine, who in De symbolo identifies the Jews as people who walk in obscurity but who nonetheless carry the light of Scripture for those who follow in their footsteps: "O Iudaei, ad hoc ferentes in minibus lucernam Legis, ut aliis viam demonstretis, et vobis tenebras ingeratis," ("O Jews, you carry in your hands the torch of the law, and while you light the way for others, you are yourselves shrouded in darkness"; qtd. in Singleton 2: 527). Augustine's trope is a variation on the one Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 3-the veiling of Moses's face and the blindness of those who read only in littera and not according to the spirit. Both these texts identify what is meant to be a proper Christian interpretation of the Old Testament; both also shed their light on what Dante is doing with Virgil throughout the Commedia-celebrating the author of incomparable poetic texts, but then exposing them as dead letters until decoded and superseded by a Christian hermeneutic.

But Dante does more, of course, than shed new light on Virgil's ancient text: he uses the divine Aeneid-l'altissimo poema-in order to write a text meant in every way to surpass it. In other words, he turns to Virgil for validation of his own poetic enterprise at the very time that he invalidates his "master and author." We see this most spectacularly in Purgatorio 30, when Virgil is quite literally replaced by one he has identified from the very outset as a more worthy soul (anima ... piu di me degna; Inferno 1.122). This "changing of the guard" entails an extraordinary effacement of Virgilian text precisely when Beatrice appears. The sequence is a tour de force of allusion, translation, and echo-a literary fadeout that enacts on a linguistic level Virgil's exit from the narrative.11 Scarcely less astonishing is Inferno 20, where, in discussing the origins of his native city of Mantua, Virgil establishes the one and only true account. All others, he says, "defraud the truth" (la verita ... frodi; v. 99)-including the one Virgil himself offers in the Aeneid!12 But there are also less spectacular moments that dramatize Dante's appeal to Virgil's precedent and authority at the same time that he presents his own efforts as "more worthy."