3 The “Convivio”
The Convivio, or “Banquet,” bears a somewhat similar relation to the work of Dante’s second period as the Vita Nuova did to that of his adolescence. Just as after the death of Beatrice he collected his earlier lyrics, furnishing them with prose narrative and commentary, so now in exile he intended to put together fourteen of his later canzoni and write a prose commentary upon them, to the honour and glory of his mystical lady, Philosophy. Dante was certainly not acquainted with Plato’s Symposium. It was from the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boëthius that the idea came to him of representing Philosophy as a woman; but the “woman of ful greet reverence by semblaunt,” who “was ful of so greet age, that men ne wolde nat trowen, in no manere, that she were of oure elde” (so Chaucer renders Boëthius), is transformed to the likeness of a donna gentile, the idealised human personality of the poetry of the “dolce stil nuovo”:
“And I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady; and I could not imagine her in any bearing save that of compassion; wherefore so willingly did the sense of truth look upon her, that scarcely could I turn it from her. And from this imagining I began to go there where she revealed herself in very sooth, to wit, in the schools of religious and at the disputations of philosophers; so that in a short time, perchance of thirty months, I began to feel so much of her sweetness, that her love drove out and destroyed every other thought” (Conv. ii. 13).
The Convivio is an attempt to bring philosophy out of the schools of religious and away from the disputations of philosophers, to render her beauty accessible even, to the unlearned. “The Convivio”, says Dr. Wicksteed, “might very well be described as an attempt to throw into popular form the matter of the Aristotelian treatises of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas.” Dante’s text is the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know”; which he elaborates from the commentary of Aquinas and the latter’s Summa contra gentiles. He would gather up the crumbs which fall from the table where the bread of Angels is eaten, and give a banquet to all who are deprived of this spiritual food. It is the first important work on philosophy written in Italian—an innovation which Dante thinks necessary to defend in the chapters of the introductory treatise, where he explains his reasons for commenting upon these canzoni in the vernacular instead of Latin, and incidentally utters an impassioned defence of his mother-tongue, with noteworthy passages on the vanity of translating poetry into another language and the potentialities of Italian prose (Conv. i. 7, 10).
In addition to this principal motive for writing the work, the desire of giving instruction, Dante himself alleges another—the fear of infamy, timore d’infamia (Conv. i. 2): “I fear the infamy of having followed such great passion as whoso reads the above-mentioned canzoni will conceive to have held sway over me; the which infamy ceases entirely by the present speaking of myself, which shows that not passion, but virtue, has been the moving cause.” It would seem that Dante intended to comment upon certain of the canzoni connected with real women, and to represent them as allegorical; it may be that, consumed with a more than Shelleyan passion for reforming the world, he chose this method of getting rid of certain episodes in the past which he, with too much self-severity, regarded as rendering him unworthy of the sublime office he had undertaken. And, by a work of lofty style and authority, he would rehabilitate the man who, in his exiled wanderings, had “perchance cheapened himself more than truth wills” (i. 4).
Only the introductory treatise and three of the commentaries were actually written: those on the canzoni Voi cite ’ntendendo, Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, Le dolci rime d’amor. If the whole work had been completed on the same scale as these four treatises, a great part of the field of knowledge open to the fourteenth century would have been traversed in the ardent service of this mystical lady, whom the poet in the second treatise—not without considerable inconsistency—represents as the same as the donna gentile who appeared towards the end of the Vita Nuova (Conv. ii. 2). As it is, the movements of the celestial bodies, the ministry of the angelic orders, the nature of the human soul and the grades of psychic life, the mystical significance and universality of love, are among the subjects discussed in the second and third treatises. The fourth treatise is primarily ethical: nobility as inseparable from love and virtue, wealth, the Aristotelian definition of moral virtue and human felicity, the goal of human life, the virtues suitable to each age, are among the themes considered. Under one aspect the Convivio is a vernacular encyclopaedia (like the Trésor of Brunetto Latini), but distinguished from previous mediaeval works of the kind by its peculiar form, its artistic beauty, and its personal note. From the first treatise it is evident that the whole work had been fully planned; but it is not possible to reconstruct it with any plausibility, or to decide upon the question of which of the extant canzoni were to be included, and in what order. From iv. 26, it may be conjectured that the passionate canzone, Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro (Rime ciii., O. canz. xii.), was to be allegorised in the seventh treatise; while, from i. 12, ii. 1, iv. 27, it appears fairly certain that the canzone of the three ladies, Tre donne intorno al cor (Rime civ., O. canz. xx.), would have been expounded in the fourteenth, where Justice and Allegory were to have been discussed; and, from i. 8 and iii. 15, that the canzone against the vices, Doglia mi reca (Rime cvi., O. canz. x.), was destined for the poetical basis of the last treatise of all. It is thus clear that the Convivio would have ended with the two canzoni which form the connecting link between the lyrical poems and the Divina Commedia. For the rest, it is certain that there would have been no mention of Beatrice in any of the unwritten treatises. In touching upon the immortality of the soul (Conv. ii. 9), Dante had seen fit to end what he wished to say of “that living blessed Beatrice, of whom I do not intend to speak more in this book.” There seems also good reason for supposing that the canzone for the beautiful lady of the Casentino (Rime cxvi., O. canz. xi.), which may be of a slightly later date than the others, would not have formed part of the completed work.
Witte and others after him have supposed that the Convivio represents an alienation from Beatrice; that the Philosophy, which Dante defines as the amorous use of wisdom, is a presumptuous human science leading man astray from truth and felicity along the dangerous and deceptive paths of free speculation. There is, however, nothing in the book itself to support this interpretation,18 and, indeed, a comparison between the second canzone, Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona, and the first canzone of the Vita Nuova points to the conclusion that the personification of philosophy is but a phase in the apotheosis of Beatrice herself. The Convivio is the first fruit of Dante’s labours to fulfil the promise made at the end of the book of his youth; his knowledge of literature and philosophy has immeasurably widened, his speculations on human life and nature have matured, and his prose style, in its comparative freedom and variety, its articulation and passages of spontaneous eloquence, shows a vast progress from that of the Vita Nuova.
There are passages in the Convivio which appear to be contradicted in the Divina Commedia. One of the most curious is the treatment of Guido da Montefeltro, who, in Conv. iv. 28, is “our most noble Italian,” and a type of the noble soul returning to God in the last stage of life, whereas, in the Inferno (Canto xxvii.), he is found in the torturing flames of the evil counsellors. Several opinions are directly or indirectly withdrawn in the Paradiso; but these are to be rather regarded as mistakes which, in the light of subsequent knowledge, Dante desired to rectify or repudiate; such as the theory of the shadow on the moon being caused by rarity and density, based upon Averroës, and a peculiar arrangement of the celestial hierarchies, derived from the Moralia of St. Gregory the Great. And, in the Purgatorio, the poet discards his “dread of infamy,” when he dares not meet Beatrice’s gaze in the Garden of Eden; he casts aside the allegorical veil he had tried to draw over a portion of the past, and makes the full confession which we find in Cantos xxx. and xxxi. In the fourth treatise, an erroneous sentence attributed to Frederick II. (in reality a mutilated version of the definition of nobility given by Aristotle in the Politics) leads Dante to examine the limits and foundation of the imperial authority, the divine origin of Rome and the universal dominion of the Roman people, the relation of philosophy to government; a theme which he will work out more fully and scientifically in the Monarchia. The result is two singularly beautiful chapters (iv.-v.); a prose hymn to Rome, an idealised history of the city and her empire. It is the first indication of the poet’s conversion from the narrower political creed of the Florentine citizen to the ideal imperialism which inspires his later works.
It has sometimes been held that portions of the Convivio were written before exile. Nevertheless, while two of the canzoni were composed before 1300, it seems most probable that the prose commentaries took their present shape between Dante’s breaking with his fellow-exiles and the advent of Henry VII. A passage concerning Frederick II., “the last emperor of the Romans with respect to the present time, although Rudolph and Adolph and Albert were elected after his death and that of his descendants” (Conv. iv. 3), shows that the fourth treatise was written before the election of Henry VII., in November 1308; while a reference to Gherardo da Cammino, lord of Treviso (iv. 14), seems to have been written after his death in March 1306. From the mention of Dante’s wanderings in exile through so many regions of Italy (i. 3), it has sometimes been argued that the first is later than the subsequent treatises. It is tempting to associate the breaking off the work with Boccaccio’s story of the recovery of the beginning of the Inferno. Be that as it may, the advent of the new Caesar, Dante’s own return for a while to political activity, probably interrupted his life of study; and, when the storm passed away and left the poet disillusioned, his ideals had changed, another world lay open to his gaze, and the Convivio was finally abandoned.
Footnotes
10 Io spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna: dicer (dire) and detta, have here (as elsewhere in Dante) the sense of artistic utterance, and more particularly composition in poetry, whether in Latin or the vernacular. Cf. V. N. xxv.
11 Livi has shown that the first documentary evidence of the existence of the Vita Nuova as a book is found at Bologna in June 1306.
12 The Sexcentenary Dante admits as authentic one canzone not included in this series: Lo doloroso amor che mi conduce (Rime lxviii., O. canz. xvi.*); which is evidently an early composition.
13 Cf. Rime xlviii., lvi., lxiii. and the later xcix.; O. son. xlviii.*, ball. viii., son. I.*, son. xxxvii.*
14 Note especially Rime lix., lxvi.; O. sonnets lv., xxxviii*.
15 To this group I would assign the sonnet, Chi guarderà già mai sanza paura, and the ballata, I’ mi son pargoletta bella e nova, without attaching any special significance to the fact that “pargoletta” (“maiden” or “young girl”) occurs also in the canzone, Io son venuto al punto de la rota, and in Beatrice’s rebuke, Purg. xxxi. 59.
16 Cf. G. Livi, Dante suoi primi cultori sua gente in Bologna, p. 24.
17 Barbi adds to the Rime written in exile the impressive political sonnet, yearning for justice and peace, Se vedi li docchi miei di pianger vaghi (of which the attribution to Dante has sometimes been questioned), and the sonnet on Lisetta, Per quella via che la bellezza corre, a beautiful piece of unquestionable authenticity, but which may, perhaps, belong to an earlier epoch in the poet’s life.
18 But cf. Wicksteed, From Vita Nuova to Paradiso, pp. 93-121.