Dante, Bush and Mussolini

Dante, Bush and Mussolini

That Dante predicted the glories of Mussolini was a finding of Fascist scholars. That Dante equally foreshadowed the salvation of the world procured by George W. Bush is my modest contribution to literary criticism and historical research. To understand both predictions we must recall a few facts about Dante, his major work, the Divine Comedy, the key political issue of his time and the medieval general mode of thought.

The Middle Age mind thrived in symbols and metaphors. Even today, he who has gazed at the façade of a Medieval Gothic Cathedral will have experienced an immediate sense of spiritual uplifting, the perception of a symbolic reach towards heaven almost transcending the actual physical structure. In turn, the whole Cathedral is a library, where architectural elements, sculptures, decorations, glasswork, frescos are symbols. Men, women, angels, saints, devils, dragons, wild or domestic or imaginary animals, trees, plants, flowers, leaves are symbols in themselves or recall other symbols by their various dispositions and interconnections. Altogether a medieval cathedral is an encyclopedia of the Cosmos and of man and of his relation to God and the Universe. Dante’s poetry is the embodiment in literature of the symbolic nature of medieval art.

The key political issue of Dante’s time was whether the Pope should rule both the spiritual and the material world, or whether the Pope should deal with spiritual and the Emperor with material matters. Roughly speaking, those who sided with the Pope were called Guelphs and those who sided with the Emperor were called Ghibellines. Dante was a Ghibelline. Though profoundly religious he was at odds with the Church whom he unceremoniously called ‘puttana’. A sentiment echoed 200 years later by a feisty German monk who, on visiting Rome in 1508 called the establishment ‘the Whore of Babylon’ and set himself to write the Protest of which we know the results and consequences. The monk was, of course, Martin Luther.

The Divine Comedy is a poetical and allegoric account of an extended travel through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Analogies, metaphors and allegories are the stuff of the Divine Comedy. To recall the definitions, if I say, for example, ‘Cheney is like an ass’, that is an analogy. If I say ‘Cheney is an ass’ that is a metaphor. An allegory, in turn, is an extended metaphor or a series of interconnected metaphors.

Of interest to us here are the first chapter (or ‘Canto’) of the Inferno and the XXXII and XXXIII Cantos of the Purgatory. By the way, the elegant use of ‘Inferno’ in English as a synonym of ‘Hell’ is a direct derivation from Dante.

Shortly after landing in Hell, Dante finds his road barred by three wild beasts right out of the Medieval Bestiary, one of them is a fierce looking she-wolf. Dante is frightened - at that moment he sees oncoming the Latin poet Virgil from whom he asks help. "Save me from her, famous sage – Dante says – she makes my veins and pulses tremble." (‘Aiutami da lei, famoso saggio, ch'ella mi fa tremar le vene e i polsi.’).

Virgil’s obvious but valuable advice is to take an alternate route, he then tells Dante something about the beast. The she-wolf represents the compound of avarice and greed which afflicts the church – even after the beast feeds she is hungrier than ever (‘e dopo 'l pasto ha più fame che pria’). The only creature capable of defeating the beast is (will be) another medieval symbolic animal, called veltro. Technically a veltro is a hound dog but it also represents an emanation of the Trinity who uses the ‘veltro’ as a means of salvation. The diet of this most unusual hound dog consists of love, virtue and wisdom and he comes from a place located between ‘feltro e feltro’ (literally between felt and felt).

Scholars have debated at length what Dante meant but here we are only concerned with the Fascist interpretation. Every administration of whatever country or color does not lack flatterers (the uncomplimentary but colorful Italian term is ‘leccaculi’). The Fascist literary flatterers developed the following theory. Feltre is a town not far from Venice. Further south in the Marche there is the town of Montefeltro. In between ‘Feltre’ and ‘Montefeltro’ (read ‘feltro e feltro’) lies the region of Romagna. Romagna happens to be the birthplace of Mussolini. Therefore Dante predicted where the ‘veltro’ came from and by inference who he was.

Let’s fast forward to Canto XXXII at the end of Dante’s journey through Purgatory. Just before leaving Purgatory for Paradise he sees oncoming an oxen-drawn wagon. The wagon is attacked in turn by an eagle and by a dragon - after which various monstrous heads spring out of the body of the wagon, each with a varying number of horns. In the center of the wagon a lascivious ‘puttana’ is attached to a jealous giant. The said lady casts a meaningful glance to Dante - whereupon the giant immediately batters her in a burst of domestic violence and drags her away into a wood.

Dante is taken aback by the scene that has distinct Hollywood horror-movie qualities. In the next Canto Beatrice, his guide through Paradise, gives Dante some explanations and a prophecy. He who will get rid of the puttana and the giant, repair the wagon and bring it on the correct path (i.e. the Church will drop her claim to temporal power), will be a celestial messenger represented by the numbers 500, 10 and 5. But 500 in Latin is represented by the letter ‘D’, 5 by the letter ‘V’ that in Latin can also be read as ‘U’ and 10 in Latin is written ‘X’. Together they form the word ‘DUX’, Latin for ‘Duce’. Conclusion? Mussolini, born in Romagna (between felt and felt) will become ‘Duce’ and with his new agreement with the Church (the famous Concordat of 1929) will fulfill Virgil’s and Beatrice’s appealing predictions.

My discovery is much simpler and shorter. In the first Canto of the Inferno Dante says,

Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
for the straight way was lost.
Ah, how hard it is to tell
the nature of that wood, savage, dense and harsh
the very thought of it renews my fear!

The Italian word for ‘wood’ is ‘selva’ but ‘selva’ also means ‘bush’. It follows that Dante found himself in a bush (‘mi ritrovai in una selva oscura’). And although he was afraid at first (‘nel pensier rinova la paura’) it was through the bush that he found his way through Hell and eventually to the salvation of Paradise. Just as Bush is saving the world from itself and is providing a path to happiness and greatness for all Americans.

In proof refer to Bush’ speech (Summer 2003), from which I quote "We are the greatest nation on earth, inhabited by the best people who exist on the face of the earth". Encouraged by this pronouncement I contacted the White House to ask if the property of greatness and excellence also applies to resident aliens, or to illegal aliens, or to the 2.1 million people currently in jail. No answer as yet.

As for the prophecy, feel free to give a different interpretation to Dante’s lines, mine is only an option.

Jimmie Moglia

Post Scriptum. Dante is to Italian what Shakespeare is to English. Many lines have (as the experts say), aphoristic qualities – that is, they stand by themselves irrespective of the context of the play they come from. See, for example, Shakespeare’s ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’, ‘Ripeness is all’, etc.
I cannot leave the subject of Dante without remembering an episode involving my grandfather. He was a very generous man, a freethinker and a socialist but never belonged to any party. He steadfastly refused - to the dramatic detriment of his career in the railways - to enroll in the Fascist party.
He was also devoted to literature. When I was a boy he had a bout with pneumonia and was briefly hospitalized in Turin. On his recovery my mother and I went to meet him. As he stepped out of the hospital entrance door my grandfather’s words were the last line from the last Canto of the Inferno, "Then we came forth, to see again the stars" (‘E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle’). I can still hear his voice, as if it were now.

-Shakespeare's Views on the News-

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