Abstract
The phrase “Dante the pilgrim” has become commonplace within scholarship on the Commedia as a way to refer to the character within the text who travels the Christian afterlife, as distinct from “Dante the poet,” the voice which narrates the poem. Yet, despite such prevalence, the validity of the term “pilgrim” goes rather unquestioned by scholars. This study aims to challenge the label through Dante’s own definition of a peregrino in the Vita nuova as “chiunque è fuori de la sua patria” (XL.6), a definition that shows a more nuanced understanding of the term than modern scholarship acknowledges. Instead, by tracing out the legacy of the term “Dante the pilgrim” as emerging from late 19th-century criticism such as Francesco de Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana, this article will show that the typical understanding of pilgrim ignores a central dimension of Dante’s own definition: a sense of physical displacement. For Dante, pilgrimage becomes constitutive of the virtual world in the poem, drawing off of material practices of travel to inform the physical experiences of the protagonist. This literal level, signified by an embodied protagonist in similar ways as pilgrims to holy sites interacted with those places, is fundamental for interpreting the larger theological truths Dante conveys, even in minute details such as kicking rocks in Inferno 12.
One of the most enduring elements of modern Dante criticism has been the consideration of the poem’s protagonist as a pilgrim and, thereby, that the entire journey denoted in the Commedia is a pilgrimage. Indeed, one has to merely open up any recent edition of the poem or scholarship on it to find the terms “Dante the pilgrim” and “pilgrimage.” This term has become rather standard nomenclature used in reference to the character Dante in the poem, and while we can understand its use as a way to distinguish between the two Dantes that appear in the text—the poet, writing in retrospect of his experience, and the character or personaggio of Dante himself, traveling through the Christian afterlife—its use nonetheless evokes something more: that the character of Dante is indeed a “pilgrim” in some sense of the word that all scholars, implicitly or explicitly, imply in their continual use of those terms. The general prevalence of the term raises a simple question: do we all mean the same thing when we refer to the character Dante as a “pilgrim”? And do all readers, whether they be Dantisti, scholars in other fields, or the general public coming to Dante with fresh eyes, share such an understanding of the label?
The greater peculiarity of this in fact arises when we acknowledge that Dante scholarship has seen a relative dearth of attempts to view the Florentine poet’s work in relation to a larger medieval culture of pilgrimage. What we might consider to be the foundational work on the matter was written by John G Demaray in the 1970s and attempted to show that the allegorical construction of the world of the Commedia is achieved in imitation of elements from the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Demaray’s study has been looked upon rather unfavorably by Dante scholars, such that only a handful of scholars since have taken up the topic of historical pilgrimage in relation to Dante. 1 Yet there has been no substantial attempt to re-examine the sources addressed by Demaray, no attempt to return with fresh eyes to the accounts left behind by actual historical pilgrims.
This approach is only one of a number of disparate trends in regards to “pilgrimage” in Dante Studies, a fact that already belies any presumed universal sense of “Dante the pilgrim.” The most common reading instead is that of human life as a pilgrimage to God, an itinerarium in Deum, an overcoming of humanity’s alienation from God, and the hoped-for return to God. This notion was indeed pervasive within medieval thought, drawn from the writings of St. Paul and St. Augustine, and then activated in the Commedia through the typology of Exodus, evoked early on in Purgatorio through direct quotation of the incipit of Psalm 113, “In exitu Isräel de Aegypto” (Purg. 2.46). 2 This reading, attested by scholars from Charles S Singleton to Teodolinda Barolini and, most recently, Alessandro Vettori, places the appellation of Dante “the pilgrim” as an Auerbachean figura, stated succinctly by Michelangelo Picone: “Essere, o essere stati, peregrini significa, o ha significato, essere lontani da Dio” (Picone, 1979: 136). 3
And still, despite the work that has been done on the topic in a variety of ways, there is no overwhelming consensus on the signification of the character Dante as a “pilgrim,” a fact further underscored by the still extant variety of terms scholars employ, such as the frequent Italianate “Dante-personaggio.” 4 This returns us again to the fundamental question: why do we call Dante a “pilgrim,” and is that identification correct? This “Dante the pilgrim” is a term that has a history—a particular and forgotten one within Dante Studies—that is as connected to questions of “pilgrimage” as it is to the critical distinction between Dante the poet and Dante the character. More importantly, however, the historical question of “Dante the pilgrim” has been distanced from the exact definition that Dante provides in the Vita Nuova: “è peregrino chiunque è fuori de la sua patria” (XL.6). 5 This relatively straightforward definition, which Dante terms the “largo” or broader definition, encompasses the full polyvalence of the Latin peregrinus, a word that meant foreigner, traveler, and exile before it was given religious significations. It serves as a clarifying moment for understanding Dante’s use of the term throughout the remainder of his literary production, one whose influence reverberates across our understanding of the Commedia, challenging the critical assumption of “Dante the pilgrim.”
Perhaps the better question to ask ourselves then is: would Dante have called himself a pilgrim? The answer, while nuanced, is that the category with which we commonly apply this label is at odds with how he understood the word peregrino and is contingent upon an important detail: the character Dante journeys while alive and in his body, thereby rendering the journey a temporary one. Yet this bodily state is in fact constitutive of how Dante saw peregrino and its corresponding action, peregrinatio. As he so elegantly gestures at the ascent into the heavenly spheres in Paradiso, in the very place where the question of the character’s bodily presence is most plagued by dubiety, Dante shifts the question of his bodily state to a desire to understand the mystery of the Incarnation, thereby stressing a positive relation between human body and Christ: S’io era corpo […] accender ne dovria più il disio di veder quella essenza in che si vede come nostra natura e Dio s’unio. [If I was a body […] it should kindle within us more desire to see that Essence where is seen how our nature and God became one]. (Par. II.37–42)
In order to begin to understand this process, let us first turn to a proper understanding of the lexical and cultural context. Dante’s peregrino etymologically derives from the Latin adverb peregre, or per + ager, meaning “from the field,” or “from abroad.” Originating then from an implicit opposition between ager/rus (“countryside”) and urbs (“city”), the noun peregrinus came to be used by Roman authors such as Cicero to indicate both a foreigner and a traveler. It belonged to a larger class of terms in ancient Rome that were used to classify foreigners, yet it also denoted a particular status in Roman law: someone who was a subject of the Roman Republic and later Empire but did not have the full legal rights of a citizen. Peregrinus thus denoted a certain level of legal exclusion and was often used as a synonym of exile. 9 As the Bible came to be translated into Latin by Jerome, peregrinus was used in all the aforementioned contexts, including extending the legal exile to the theological realm as a marker of alienation from God. 10 By the end of the 4th century, peregrinus and peregrinatio had become increasingly multivalent, maintaining their original meanings but also coming to express a status, either legal or theological, of alienation and exclusion. The understanding of a peregrinus as a “pilgrim” in the sense of someone who journeys to a holy place or person was never utilized by Jerome or even Augustine, who were both familiar with the phenomenon, and instead developed over subsequent centuries, further complicating the linguistic landscape as the previous meanings were still preserved. 11
It is Augustine in particular, of course, who provides a systematic transformation of the political idea of peregrinatio into a fully elucidated spiritual ideal in the De civitate Dei that was to exert great force upon subsequent medieval thinking. While Augustine recuperates the juiridic-exilic qualities of peregrinatio as a spiritual condition, properly understood it is always the civitas that is in peregrinatio. This makes it a social event whose end is stabilitas in heaven, a return to the order that was given to humankind prior to the fall, although the state of being peregrinate derives from the body as a source of ontological exclusion: “Ciuitas autem caelestis uel potius pars eius, quae in hac mortalitate peregrinatur et uiuit ex fide” (The Heavenly City—or rather that part of it which is on pilgrimage in this condition of mortality, and which lives on the basis of faith,” XIX.xvii.4). 12
Augustine’s treatment of the theme was particularly enduring in later Christian thought, explicitly evoked in Dante’s Letter to the Italian Cardinals. 13 As Gerhart Ladner has shown, peregrinatio became to be seen in greater relation to the concepts of via and viator—seen together with Jesus’s “Ego sum via” (John 14:6)—and also as an opposition of alienus/alienatio to ordo/ordinare, wherein the activity of peregrinatio had its aim as a return to or a reacquisition of order (Ladner, 1967: 233). This widened lexical field thereby transposed Augustine’s notion of peregrinus into that of homo viator, a lexicon that, as we already saw, was utilized by Thomas Aquinas, solidifying its ontological basis in the mortal human body. 14
The polysemic nature of peregrinatio is precisely what we must keep in mind when we look at Dante, as within the pages of the youthful Vita Nuova he provides a definition of the Italian peregrino that he never once varies from throughout the remainder of his artistic career. After the death of Beatrice, Dante encounters some “peregrini” in Florence, who are specified as traveling to see the Veronica, then housed at Rome (XL.1). This occurrence, however, prompts Dante to clarify the terminology he is using: E dissi “peregrini” secondo la larga significazione del vocabulo, ché peregrini si possono intendere in due modi, in uno largo e in uno stretto: in largo, in quanto è peregrino chiunque è fuori de la sua patria; in modo stretto, non s’intende peregrino se non chi va verso la casa di sa’ Iacopo o riede. E però è da sapere che in tre modi si chiamano propriamente le genti che vanno al servigio de l’Altissimo: chiamansi palmieri, in quanto vanno oltremare, là onde molte volte recano la palma; chiamansi peregrini, in quanto vanno a la casa di Galizia, però che la sepultura di sa’ Iacopo fue più lontana de la sua patria che d’alcuno altro apostolo; chiamansi romei, in quanto vanno a Roma, là ove questi cu’ io chiamo peregrini andavano. [I wrote pilgrims in the broader sense of the term, for the word pilgrims can be understood in two ways, one broad and one narrow: in the broad sense, a pilgrim is anyone who is outside his homeland; in the narrow sense pilgrim is used only for one who travels toward the home of Saint James or returns from it. And it is worth noting that there are three separate terms for people who travel to honor the Supreme Being: they are called palmers if they travel to the Holy Land, where they often carry the palm; they are called pilgrims if they travel to the home of Galicia, since the tomb of Saint James was farther from his homeland than that of any other apostle; they are called romers if they travel to Rome—the place where those I am calling pilgrims were headed]. (XL.6–7; translation mine)
The introduction of peregrini in this context in the Vita Nuova is suggestive, especially in consideration of the likely occurrence of the episode during Easter week. 17 In his reading of the last sections of the Vita Nuova, Michelangelo Picone has argued that Dante’s characterization of these travelers as ignorant of the death of Beatrice (“Non credo che anche udissero parlare di questa donna,” “I do not think they have ever heard of my lady,” XL.2) constructs a parallel with the Biblical Emmaus scene, in which Jesus appears to two disciples who ask if he is a “peregrinus” and if he is aware of the events of the Crucifixion (Luke 24:18). Yet, as Christ then reveals the truth of the scriptures to the disciples, so too do the “peregrini” to Dante, as they reflexively shift his focus away from grief to Beatrice as the “essemplo” of Christ, blessed in heaven, a fact marked further by their classification as “romeo” (Picone, 1979: 182–186), establishing an early connection of peregrino to Christ. 18
This context is important for approaching the Commedia, where, of the nine uses of peregrino and the variant pel(l)egrino, only three truly bear on the question of the character Dante as a “pilgrim,” as these are the only ones that include the character Dante in some way: Purg II.63, XIII.96, and Par. XXXI.43. 19 The first statement—the only one that refers to Dante directly—occurs after Virgil and Dante find themselves on the shores of Mount Purgatory, having just witnessed the arrival of the vasello bearing new souls. These new arrivals ask the poets, “Se voi sapete,/ mostratene la via di gire al monte” (“If you know it, show us the way to climb the mountain,” Purg II.59–60), to which Virgil replies: “Voi credete/ forse che siamo esperti d’esto loco;/ ma noi siam peregrin come voi siete” (“You believe perhaps that we are experts of this place; but we are peregin as you are,” 61–63). If we consider the meaning of peregrin in this context, the notion of “pilgrim” as a religious pilgrim hardly fits. While the newly arrived souls will come to ascend Mount Purgatory along with Dante and Virgil, Virgil is of course pagan and damned and here as a temporary guide, from which he will eventually return to Limbo for the rest of eternity; thus, including himself as a “peregrin” precludes this reading. The commentary tradition agrees that peregrin should be taken as strangers, foreigners, or people newly arrived, with the connection to the broad definition in the Vita Nuova being picked up by many commentators as well. 20
Yet, after Giacomo Poletto observed a connection with the psalm “In exitu Isräel de Aegypto” sung by the newly arrived souls earlier in the canto, a particularly religious understanding of the term as used in Purg. II.63 gained traction in early 20th-century Dante criticism.
21
This notion—inspired by Francesco De Sanctis’s (1890: 180) reading of the Commedia as a “redenzione dell’anima nel suo pellegrinaggio dall’umano al divino” (“redemption of the soul in its pilgrimage from the human to the divine”), a figural journey of redemption and reacquiring “la patria dell’anima” of heaven
22
—was then codified by Charles S Singleton who read the Purgatorial scene together with Psalm 113 and its fourfold exegesis in the Letter to Can Grande as a figural Exodus, the “conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace” (Singleton, 1965: 103).
23
He continued to elaborate on this notion, leading to the following conclusion: [In Hell] souls may not be seen as “pilgrims,” eternally fixed in their places as they are. Nor may souls in Paradise be thought of as being “in via,” for they have reached the patria. But Purgatory, as Dante chose to picture that realm of the Afterlife, can lend itself especially to the metaphor of pilgrimage. Souls there can indeed be seen as pilgrims, and so join the company of the wayfarer who is constantly realizing that metaphor. (Singleton, 1965: 113)
This foregrounding is necessary to properly situate the use of peregrino in Dante’s conversation with Sapia, in which notions of exclusion and a heavenly homeland take center stage. Upon his arrival on the terrace of envy, Dante asks if any of the souls there are “latina” (“Italian,” Purg. XIII.9–12), to which Sapia replies: O frate mio, ciascuna è cittadina D’una vera città; ma tu vuo’ dire che vivesse in Italia peregrina. [O my brother, each of us is citizen of one true city, but you mean to say “Who lived in Italy as a pilgrim (peregrina)]. (94–96)
Following this statement’s Augustinian pretext and its political implications, we can see Purg. XIII.94–96 in relation to Beatrice’s statement of heavenly citizenship near the end of Purgatorio: “Qui sarai tu poco tempo silvano;/ e sarai meco sanza fine cive/ di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano” (“Here [in the earthly paradise] you will be but briefly a dweller in the wood; and with me, without end, you will be a citizen of that Rome of which Christ is a Roman,” Purg. XXXII.100–102). These verses have been seen as central to Dante’s political beliefs, in parallel with the Monarchia, and expressive of a shift from Dante’s historical exile and thereby loss of earthly citizenship to a new one in the true patria of Heaven—a status given, as it were, through Christ: “quella Roma onde Cristo è romano.” 27
The thrust of these statements would thus seem to accord with both the Exodus patterning and the largely Pauline-Augustinian way of reading peregrino in the Commedia as indicating humanity’s exclusion from God in the earthly life that is to be reconciled through a return to the patria of heaven. Yet let us pause and reflect on the implications of this statement together with Dante’s definition of “è peregrino chiunque è fuori della sua patria” (VN XL.6). Sapia and Beatrice tie together the notion of true human citizenship as coming from the Empyrean, God’s city, thereby postulating the true patria as the Empyrean itself. And this is in fact where we run into an issue with the appellation of “Dante the pilgrim.” As Giuseppe Mazzotta (1979: 256) so aptly observed, despite its implications being untouched by subsequent scholars with the principal exception of Bruno Basile, “The poem is actually open-ended, with the poet away from his promised land and still in exile.” 28 The complication here is that, if the patria is the Empyrean, Dante ceases to be a peregrino in Par. XXX–XXXIII, even if his stay there is temporary, and then returns to earthly life as peregrino. This then erases the distinction between “pilgrim” and “poet” when we properly consider Dante’s definition of peregrino in light of Sapia’s statement together with the shape of the Commedia as a whole.
Before resting too much upon this conclusion, we have to recognize that this reflects only one instance of the word in the Commedia. The picture, however, becomes more complex when we turn to the final use of the word in the poem, which occurs precisely upon Dante’s advent into the Empyrean. Here, Dante describes his wonder at what he sees, first referring to the amazement of the barbarians upon seeing Rome and specifically the Lateran, then providing a further comparison: E quasi peregrin che si ricrea nel tempio del suo voto riguardando, e spera già ridir com’ ello stea. [And like a pilgrim who refreshes himself, gazing, in the temple of his vow, and hopes, later, to relate what it is like]. (Par. XXXI.43–45) ïo, che al divino da l’umano, a l’etterno dal tempo era venuto, e di Fiorenza in popol giusto e sano. [I, who had come to the divine from the human, to the eternal from time, and from Florence to a people just and whole]. (37–40)
We thus have a seeming discontinuity in the dynamics of peregrino’s signification here in the poem. While not altogether impossible, this notion is nonetheless surprising given Dante’s care in constructing the language of the Commedia. In reality, however, Dante does provide us with an answer to this crux: his definition from the Vita Nuova of “è peregrino chiunque è fuori della sua patria” (XL.6). While moments such as Sapia’s discourse or the uses of peregrinatio in the Letter to the Cardinals might espouse a particular utilization of an Augustinian mode, they nonetheless remain consistent with this youthful statement. The question to ask, then, is not why does Dante switch modes in the climatic moment of the Commedia, but rather why do they both still conform to the same definition and what use does that provide the poem? The answer is in fact one that has been central to this discourse: Dante’s mortal state vis-a-vis his body. It is precisely because Dante is not yet dead that his sojourn into the Empyrean and even the final vision of God are temporary experiences; he is given a glimpse of what is to come, but must return home, a precondition to the act of writing the poem itself. The very condition that makes him “quasi peregrin” (Par. XXXI.43) is also that which makes him “[vive] in Italia peregrina” (Purg. XIII.96). In fact, this very element is accentuated by Dante later in Paradiso XXXI, as he gives his thanks to Beatrice for having enabled this journey: “La tua magnificenza in me custodi,/ sì che l’anima mia, che fatt’ hai sana,/ piacente a te dal corpo si disnodi” (“Preserve the great things you have done in me, so that my soul, which you have made whole, may be still pleasing to you when its knot with the body is untied,” 88–90).
Just as the rhetorical question of Dante’s bodily presence in heaven in Paradiso II resolves by pointing to Christ’s Incarnation (Par. II.37, 40–42), so too here, in the culmination of Dante’s journey, the status of peregrino is part of a carefully balanced symmetry of Christological references. First, Dante’s prayer to Beatrice begins with an evocation of her original descent into Limbo, a metaphorical Descensus Christi ad inferos that initially opened the possibility of the entire poem (“O donna […] che soffristi per la mia salute/ in inferno lasciar le tue vestige,” “O lady […] who deigned for my salvation to leave your footprints in Hell,” 79–81).
30
Then, in response to Dante’s thanks, Beatrice smiles (“sorrise,” 92), an anticipation of Dante’s final description of the Godhead before noting the presence of “nostra effige” within it (Par. XXXIII.124–126).
31
Most importantly for this sequence, however, is the last direct reference to pilgrimage practice in the poem, completing a trio of such figures including the barbarians and the earlier pilgrim: Qual è colui che forse di Croazia viene a veder la Veronica nostra, che per antica fame non sen sazia ma dice nel pensier, fin che si mostra, “Signor mio Iesù Cristo, Dio verace, or fu sì fatta la sembianza vostra?’ [As one who comes, perhaps from Croatia, to see our Veronica, who because of his ancient hunger is not sated, but says in his thought, as long as it is shown, “My lord Jesus Christ, true God, now was your face indeed like that?”]. (XXXI.103–108)
Seen through this lens, then, the final use of peregrino in the Commedia highlights the symbiosis of humanity’s exclusion from God and Christ’s Incarnation as the way to reintegrate humanity with the divine. That Christological grounding thereby finds its expression in the character of Dante himself, and specifically within his body. In this regard, the dynamics of peregrinatio for Dante belong firmly within the sense of what Christian Moevs (2005: 61) states is a reflexive realization of the self as grounded in being through the image of Christ. This notion is implicit within Sapia’s statement and Beatrice’s emendation of “quella Roma onde Cristo è romano” (Purg. XXXII.102). It also, as Michelangelo Picone has shown, motivates Dante’s focus on the term peregrino in the Vita Nuova: they, as romei journeying to view the very Veronica just mentioned, turn Dante’s attention away from his grief and the dead body of Beatrice to her as an “essemplo” of Christ.
What all this means, then, is that referring to the character Dante as “Dante the pilgrim” fundamentally misrepresents Dante’s understanding of the character within his poem and the dynamics of peregrinatio as defined by Dante himself. The continuity between the shift that takes place in the Empyrean exists precisely because of the proper referent for peregrino as being rooted in what Guy Raffa (2000: 3–21) calls the non-duality of the Incarnation, the “both/and” of Christ as human and divine. Christ, in assuming the nature of man, assumes the same sign of exclusion in the matter of the body, and in so doing posits Himself as the way to return, precisely as Jesus proclaims in the Gospel of John: “Ego sum via et veritas et vita nemo venit ad Patrem nisi per me” (“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No man cometh to the Father, but by me,” John 14:6).
These notions of Christ as the way were intertwined with the historical practice of pilgrimage, underpinning its motivation. In the Vita Nuova, Dante provides a rough blueprint for how to view those practices which will allow us to fully understand what this redefinition of peregrinatio implies: “in tre modi si chiamano propriamente le genti che vanno al servigio de l'Altissimo” (“There are three separate terms for people who travel to honor the Supreme Being,” VN XL.7). Broadly speaking, Dante understands the action to depend on motion, on travel—“le genti che vanno”—and on intention, “servigio.” These fundamental characteristics appear as well within the simile of the peregrin in Par XXXI. Rather than an overly basic way to characterize such a phenomenon, it is nonetheless an important consideration that can be used to qualify an analysis on Dante and historical pilgrimage by reminding us of the physicality of the experience itself.
A variety of scholarship has uncovered the pervasive presence of pilgrims in Dante’s Italy, of which we can give a brief summary: they traveled along several highly populated roads like the Via Francigena and the Strada Claudia, which were also used for trade; the majority of pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem departed from Puglia or Venice; numerous “xenodochia” or hospitals for pilgrims are documented in cities along the main routes; Rome was a pilgrimage site with increased popularity in the 12th century and again at the Roman Jubilee in 1300, while there were also numerous local pilgrimage shrines such as at Pistoia and at architectural replicas of the Holy Sepulcher, like Santo Stefano in Bologna. 32 Dante even likely had at least passing acquaintance with Riccoldo da Montecroce, a Dominican posted at Santa Maria Novella from 1267 to 1288 who was later sent as a missionary to Baghdad via Jerusalem. 33 We also know from surviving pilgrimage accounts and other documentation that pilgrims shared their experiences with others met along the way, orally disseminating cultural practices to such a degree that what we might consider to be a genre of pilgrimage literature was consistent for centuries, spreading all over Europe and even to Russia. 34
Yet, pilgrimage is an activity based not only on travel, but also on forging a connection to the divine through physical contact. Pilgrims went to see and touch relics, such as the tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem or the tomb of St. James in Santiago. As Constance Classen reminds us, touch was a way to connect with the sacred, allowing it a deeper avenue into the life of the pilgrim, exemplified by the laying of hands performed by the prophets, by Jesus, and by His apostles. From this focus on touch to the act of travel, pilgrimage was fundamentally physical, a desire for the immediacy of God’s love and grace. Touch and the laying of hands were a prime mode for the transference of sanctity for the healing of ailments (Classen, 2012: 31–40). Yet, we can also consider that Christian pilgrimage is an inheritance of the Jewish tradition of the hag, a pilgrimage-feast that involved journeying to the Temple in Jerusalem in memory of being delivered from slavery in the Exodus. 35 So when Jesus proclaimed “solvite templum hoc et in tribus diebus excitabo illud” (“destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” John 2:19), prophesying His resurrection, He instituted Himself as the new temple, the new site of pilgrimage. As Andrew Lincoln (2004: 39) aptly states: “If God has an address on earth, it is no longer in Jerusalem but in the incarnate Logos. The place of the Name—here ‘I Am’ (John 4:26)—is now an embodied location, the person of Jesus.” This is not to state that Christian pilgrimage was wholly confined to a Christological focus, as the evidence of Santiago and numerous local sites attests, but Christ was certainly central to the practice from its initiation, especially as the early codification of Holy Land pilgrimage in the early fourth century by St. Helena focused on instituting the stages of Christ’s life as places of worship, as Origen said, to “trace the footprints of Jesus and his disciples.” 36
As such, the Holy Land was marked by Jesus’s historical presence and, starting in the 11th century, devotional practices began to highlight Jesus’s corporeality, allowing for a more personalized encounter with God through the literal imitation of Jesus and his ministry (imitatio Christi) which sought above all to see within oneself the imago Dei, the image of God that was part of all humanity. 37 This shift is further accounted for in both the rise of Franciscan Meditationes Vitae Christi and in pilgrimage practices, 38 as is clear in the pilgrimage account of the German monk Theoderic from the late 12th century: “Ea, quae de locis sanctis, in quibus salus, salvator noster, corporalem praesentiam exhibens suae beatae humanitatis atque nostrae redemptionis officia sive mysteria implevit” (“The things which in the Holy Places, the very places in which our Saviour revealed his corporeal presence, and did the ministry and the mysteries of his excellent humanity and our own redemption”). 39
This physicality to the act of pilgrimage, together with its grounding in connection to Christ’s humanity, are precisely what need to be borne in mind not only when seeing the phenomenon’s influence on the Commedia, but also to clarify the lens with which peregrinatio refines our understanding of Dante’s presentation of the journey in the poem. This is powerfully revealed within the Inferno, the cantica most often disregarded in studies on pilgrimage in Dante, where Dante subtly draws on contemporary pilgrimage practice to inform Dante-personaggio’s incarnate state. 40 It is the Christological nature of the first cantica that reveals how the body—the source of man’s alienation from God—can, through the movement implicit in the process of peregrinatio, trigger the self-reflection of being grounded in God through the image and likeness expressed in Christ.
So then how do historical pilgrims represent this movement? Some of these features can be seen in the class of “itineraries” in pilgrimage literature such as the first known account, the Itinerarium Burdigalense (c. 333), commonly known as the Bordeaux Pilgrim. The text, written as an itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem, lists the stops along the way and the distances between them, establishing a general modality of narration that proceeds from an indicated position and then moves according to a particular set of directions, such as the following in the anonymous First Guide: “then comes the House of Caiaphas,” “not far from that is Golgotha,” “Twelve miles further on,” and “on the left.” 41 Sequences of statements such as these, which often include direction and distance, are indexical, in that the conditions of their truth are bound to a particular place or point of view. These itineraries therefore operate not only from a local, personal perspective rather than a panoptic one, but also from a perspective that is predicated on movement, from the passage from one site to the next. The peculiarity is that often these moments are paired with a trace of the pilgrim themself such as through a simple appearance of “ambulavimus” (“we walked,” 10) in the Bordeaux Pilgrim. This is the insertion of the author into the text through action, part of the inflective nature of Latin verbs, meaning that the most fundamental presence of the pilgrim in many texts is tied to the pilgrim’s actions, signified by a textual inscription. 42
We can situate this further within an anthropological turn that has shaped pilgrimage studies in recent years, giving more attention to the dynamic role of the pilgrims themselves and their experience rather than to the places and buildings of the holy cities. 43 In his anthropology of walking, Tim Ingold (2010: S122) states that movement is “always movement in an environment: a living, breathing body is at once a body-on-the-ground and a body-in-the-air.” The entire process of pilgrimage—and the subsequent relating of that journey—is fundamentally one of charting the path of a body through space, or, in Ingold’s (2000: 219–242) terminology, the process of “mapping”: a performative action of moving through an environment that is simultaneously the building of knowledge and the construction of a relationship between the traveler and the space through which they travel. This is precisely what we see in the Bordeaux Pilgrim’s surprising use of “ambulavimus” or the First-Guide’s directions, as it denotes space indexed by movement, by a person moving through that environment, pre-supposed by the directions depending on a particular order. Taken together with the common ritualized actions of pilgrims touching and kissing sacred objects, this process of mapping suggests that the sacrality of the holy sites was seen as so intimately linked to space that in order for it to be accessed, the site has to be approached spatially through the body.
What does this all suggest for Dante? On the one hand, Patrick Boyde has shown that Dante rigorously follows the Aristotelian conception of movement in both the Convivio and the Commedia, wherein the protagonist of the later, as a living person with his human body, is a “corpus seipsum dirigens” (“self-moving/directing body”) whose movement is a change either of position or of state “for the sake of a goal.” Properly speaking then, the change of physical position is an analogous function to the change of an internal disposition in Aristotelean terms (Boyde, 1993: 173–184). In this sense, the notion of physical displacement enacted within the Commedia has the same end as the process of peregrinatio as rooted in man’s ontological exclusion from God: both are movements that aim to uncover one’s likeness with the creator and thereby to return to a proper relationship with God. On an immediate level, Dante presents the realms of the Christian afterlife from the viewpoint of his own journey through those spaces. He enacts this process of mapping as he moves in the environments in a full sensory experience as an embodied traveler, thereby relating this in a common language of human experience that can then structure the character’s relation with the surrounding space and where we, as readers, must accept the text’s basic fictions. 44
Yet the conflux of these elements emerges clearly when we pay close attention to a sequence of encounters with the physical landscape in the Inferno. As Dante and Virgil descend into the 6th circle in Inferno XII, Virgil refers to the sloped bank as a “ruina” (32), one of three such encountered in the course of the infernal journey. While here the Mantuan provides a rather pagan description of the earthquake that occurs upon the death of Christ, it is the demon Malacoda who later on provides the most specific statement as to the cause of these ruine in anticipation of the last one over the bolgia of the hypocrites: “Ier, più oltre cinqu’ ore che quest’otta, mille dugento con sessanta sei anni compié che qui la via fu rotta” (“Yesterday, five hours later than now, one thousand two hundred and sixty-six years were completed since the way was broken here,” Inf. XXI.106–114). It is in fact here—at the center of the eighth circle—that Dante provides the indication of the date of journey, having begun on Good Friday in the year 1300, which is also the only precise indication of this temporal setting given in the entire poem. The arduous, physical traversal of this final ruina from the earthquake at Christ’s death, found in Inferno 24, is the longest description of the Inferno’s landscape and Dante’s traveling of it in the entire cantica, covering a full 29 lines.
The seeming novelty of such attention can be understood if we turn again to pilgrimage practice. Just as historical pilgrims journeyed to places where, as Dante’s near contemporary Riccoldo da Montecroce says, “Christus corporaliter visitavit,” so too does Dante journey through and interact with lands marked by Jesus’s presence and ministry. 45 As Giuseppe Baglivi and Garret McCutchan (1977: 250–257) have argued, the temporal pairing of Jesus’ and Dante’s journeys, revealed in the bolgia that punishes barratry, the very crime for which Dante was falsely charged and then exiled from Florence, reveals the deep-rootedness in Christ of the mission Dante views himself as having in the Commedia.
Yet this operates on a deeper level. Dante journeys through Hell fundamentally in imitation of Christ and to thereby encounter him in the physical space of the underworld itself, a fact seen in immediate relation to the impetus of historical pilgrimage. These ruine represent the full importance of understanding the landscape of the Inferno as being a representation of how Dante’s contemporaries engaged with the material environment around them, and particularly the material environment in the holy places. Through bodily presence and contact, pilgrims sought to access the divine in the figure of Christ, a culture Dante drew upon in the creation of the Commedia and which is at the heart of the Christocentric structure of the Inferno itself. Take this episode of the ruina when Dante is first seen by the damned and one says, “Costui par vivo a l’atto de la gola;/ e s’ e’ son morti, per qual privilegio/ vanno scoperti de la grave stola?” (“That one seems alive, by the motion of his throat; but if they are dead, by what privilege are they exempt from the weighty stole?” 88–90). In this tercet, Dante strings together a number of significant referents: the presence of his protagonist’s physical body, the divine sanctioning of his journey—which connects back to Beatrice’s Descensus in Inferno II—and then a subtle reference to the Resurrection of the Flesh through “stola,” gesturing in bono to the “bianche stole” of the Empyrean (Par. XXX.128–129). Taken together with the larger context of the ruina and Caiaphas crucified on the floor of the bolgia, the whole scene stresses not only the Christological dimension of Dante’s journey, but that the Incarnation is mirrored in Dante’s own incarnate state; the peregrinatio of the Commedia, of this particular individual, the movement of a body in an environment marked by Christ, interacting with it, highlights the primacy of the human body within imitatio Christi, pointing to the potential of redemption for the complete human, body and soul.
Only in this regard can we appreciate one detail that always seems to be glossed over when Dante travels down the ruina in Inferno XII. Dante writes: “Così prendemmo via giù per lo scarco/ di quelle pietre, che spesso moviensi/ sotto i miei piedi per lo novo carco” (“So we took our way down along that scree, and the stones kept moving under my feet, because of their new burden,” 28–30). On one hand, this introduces Virgil’s comments on the ruine leading to Dante's, and our, recognition of their connection to Christ, underscoring the connection Dante saw between his character’s embodied state and the salvation history expressed by the Incarnation. Yet, we must also recall that Hell is characterized by being unchanging, as emphasized in the inscription over the gates of Hell, with the earthquake at Christ’s death which opened up the path to salvation—including forming Dante’s own path—constituting the only material change to the landscape itself. Yet here, Dante, quite literally, affects change, moving stones that will remain forever dislodged. 46 While it is minor to say that Dante moved a few rocks in comparison to whole ruins created by the greatest act of violence, Christ’s death, it is nonetheless true that Dante sets no other precedent for physically altering Hell—with the only “exception” being the opening of the gates of Dis (Inf. VIII–IX), change affected again as a result of Dante’s journey in a typological reenactment of Christ’s Descensus ad infernos and His victorious opening up of human salvation—and we, as readers, are left to assume that no one else will ever do the same after him. 47
This then is what peregrino and peregrinatio mean in regard to the Commedia: it is exclusion in the form of Dante’s body being actively present in the text, not merely as a source of wonder for the souls in the afterlife, but as something material that can affect change in Hell through the dislodging of rocks and the opening of the gates of Dis in the imitation and image of Christ. This awareness is one that emerges retrospectively. Paul Priest has remarked that Dante is “strangely ignorant that he is walking in Christ’s steps, through a gate Christ has burst open” (1982: 61), and this is indeed true. Yet Dante-poeta, from the retrospective vantage point, is aware and nonetheless can impart the Inferno with necessary Christological depth. Only in the incarnate nature of the Commedia’s protagonist can Dante manifest the self as grounded in being through Christ, a realization that has its roots in Dante’s physical participation with the signs of Christ’s presence in Hell.
Conceived properly, then, the study of peregrinatio in the Commedia is based in the study of movement and in the study of the interaction with the divine. Dante’s definition of peregrino from the Vita Nuova, given in response to meeting some actual pilgrims, along with a number of other references to pilgrimage scattered through the Commedia, gives evidence to his awareness of these elements. Our brief reading of peregrinatio in the poem shows just how formative and prevalent they are. As Tim Ingold (2010: S122) reminds us, movement “is always movement in an environment: a living, breathing body is at once a body-on-the-ground and a body-in-the-air.” Just as the movement of historical pilgrims is movement that takes place dynamically within space, engaging with it, so too does the character Dante move through the environs of Hell and affect change by being present in his body. As such, the material reality of the world presented in the Commedia is a part of its very fabric, constituted by bodily interaction with the material elements of its surrounding. Whether it be from Geryon’s flight or Dante’s scattering rocks, the material fabric is essential to the poem’s truth claims and is part of the entire process of the poem that moves from a point of exclusion from God to salvation and rediscovering the position of man within the created order of the cosmos. Just like the methods of fourfold scriptural exegesis presented in the Letter to Can Grande attests, the material reality of the poem exists and signifies beyond the literal level, but is informative of the entire process of peregrinatio, a concept that integrates the physical with the metaphysical and the theological, two common discourses in modern Dante criticism, that combine to express the essential truths Dante sought to communicate in his work.
The centrality of the character Dante, journeying in his human body, is a facet that remains a constant, and one that we must keep in consideration. It is on one hand a marker of the dynamics at play which inform the virtual reality described within the poem, but it is also what allows the truths expressed therein, “quel ver c'ha faccia di menzogna” (“that truth that has the face of a lie,” Inf. XVI.124) to be expressed, to be relatable, and to be true. For Dante writing the Commedia, just as for the numerous real people who traveled to the holy places, God is to be found in the world, in the pattern of creation, and must be reached through movement, through participation, and through the body, a body whose incarnate nature is connected to the “via, et veritas, et vita” (John 14:6) that is Christ. While Dante himself did not travel to Jerusalem and prostrate himself before Christ’s tomb, he understood the meaning inherent in that action, and so structured his great work off of such a movement: not as “Dante the pilgrim,” but as a peregrino, for all that he understood that term to mean.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank, first and foremost, Eleonora Stoppino, Rachel Jacoff, and Lino Pertile for their helpful comments as well as Robert Rushing, Theodore Cachey Jr., and Renée Trilling for their comments on an earlier draft. Parts of this article were presented at the 2017 MLA Annual Conference as “Quasi peregrin: Reevaluating Dante and Pilgrimage.”