“Dante’s Rites of Passage. From Chaos and Parody to Light and Romance through Sword, Fire, Water, and Gaze”
Saturday 2nd November 2024, Victoria College 323 (University of Toronto), 4:00 pm
The Dantean afterlife requires innumerable ritual passages of its dwellers. Upon entering the world upside down, the wicked souls submit to parodic rites of initiation, whereupon they throw themselves from Hell’s threshold down into the abyss and undergo an eternity of tormented dis-association from a loathsome horde of wicked spirits. The Pilgrim descends all the infernal thresholds and witnesses the evil souls’ torments, associating momentarily with the wicked and leaving them behind. After facing the most frightening infernal guardian at the bottom of the abyss, he finally crosses Hell’s ultimate threshold and leaves behind the infernal topsy-turvy world, turns himself upside down, and begins ascending toward Mount Purgatory. Here, together with the penitent souls, he experiences multiple rites of passage, consisting of gradual, prayerful ascents, crossings of multiple exemplary thresholds, and integrating and atoning with penitent communities with the purpose of encountering Beatrice. His purification occurs through atoning rites; through the painless and gradual erasure of seven bloodless markings carved on his forehead by the angelic doorman with a blunted sword; and through fire, water, and remorseful loss of consciousness in Eden. Ascending to the Empyrean, he performs ten rites of upward passage. He ascends joyfully, silently, and instantly from the top of Mount Purgatory to the Heaven of the moon and finally to the highest Heaven by fixing his eyes in the eyes of Beatrice, who looks upward to the highest point in Heaven. His ascents are described through a metaphoric language of ecstatic, joyful, violent rapture. In the Empyrean, God fulfills the Pilgrim’s highest desire and completes his last rite of passage, i.e., God’s vision, by bloodlessly transfixing him (percosse). Thus, the Pilgrim is allowed to see momentarily the Trinity through God Incarnate, making it possible for him to return to earth and finish his earthly life’s rites of passage.
Dino S. Cervigni was educated in Italy and the United States. He has taught at the University of Notre Dame (1974-89), and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1989-2015). He has written on autobiography (The Vita of Benvenuto Cellini: Literary Tradition and Genre, 1979); Dante (Dante’s Poetry of Dreams, 1986; Vita nuova, with Facing English Translation, 1995); religious poetry (Il tempio peregrino, poema sacroeroico di Giulio Acquaticci [1603-1688], 2010. In 2021 he has published a comprehensive study of Boccaccio’s masterpiece: Boccaccio’s Decameron: Rewriting the Christian Middle Ages and the Lyric Tradition, which he is currently translating into Italian. He is completing a three-volume study of the Vita nuova, including a new bilingual edition, a textual commentary, and a concordance. He is also working on several book-length studies on Dante, including Dante and the World Upside Down. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the annual monographic journal Annali d’italianistica (1983-), which has just published its forty-second volume.
