Dante and the Friars Minor

207 Pages·2012·14.45 MB·English

by  Davide Bolognesi

Dante and the Friars Minor:
Aesthetics of the Apocalypse

Davide Bolognesi

Submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2012
© 2012
Davide Bolognesi
All rights reserved
Dante and Friars Minor:
Aesthetics of the Apocalypse

Davide Bolognesi

ABSTRACT
This is an interdisciplinary study that aims to reassess Dante’s use of Franciscan sources in
the Divine Comedy. Particularly, I focus on two important, yet marginalized, theologians: the
Provençal friar Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, and his disciple, Ubertino da Casale. Both are coeval of
Dante Alighieri, and served as lectores in Florence. In particular, I examine the eschatological aspects
of their works, in an attempt to understand how they contribute to Dante’s own eschatological
vision. Ubertino and Olivi were extremely interested in understanding history through the dense
symbolism of the Apocalypse. Therefore, I inspected their works, particularly Olivi’s Lectura Super
Apocalipsim (a commentary on the Apocalypse written in 1298, of which there exist no modern
editions), and Ubertino’s Arbor Vitae Crucifixae Jesu, “The Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus,” a
massive work on the life of Christ, composed in 1305, in which the author incorporates and
develops large parts of Olivi’s commentary.
I attempt to disentangle the crossed references that link these two books with Dante’s Divine
Comedy. I aim to revise our knowledge of Dante’s appropriation of these sources, for I believe that
scholars have unjustly dismissed Ubertino as an unoriginal mediator, on the ground of his
ideological dependence on Olivi. Therefore I propose an amendment in Ubertino’s favor. Upon a
redefinition of Dante’s ideological genealogy, I hope to improve our comprehension of how Dante
incorporates the eschatology debate of his time in the sacred poem.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction p. v

Chapter I
Status Quaestionis
1. Ubertino and the “Problem of Discordance” p. 1
2. Who has the “Gift of the Prophetic Spirit?” p. 13
3. Ubertino’s (Exuberant) Mediation p. 26
4. Pietro di Giovanni Olivi in Dante p. 31
5. Ubertino and Olivi in the Commedia p. 39
6. “Parole ancor più gravi” P. 47

Chapter II
“Habitare In Aliquo Ramo Huius Arboris:”
Ubertino and Pietro di Giovanni Olivi
1. Insipido stilo scribere p. 59
2. Dormitat Homerus p. 65
3. Practical Teachers p. 69
4. Ego audivi. Ubertino and the Word of Mouth p. 73
5. The Time of the Antichrist p. 83
6. Apocalypse Now p. 90
7. Eschatological Time and Narrative Time: The Image of the Tree p. 102

Chapter III
“Facio Tibi Unam Arborem Imaginativam.”
The Arbor Vitae in Dante’s Commedia
1. An Imaginative Tree p. 117
2. “Esto legno dolce al gusto” p. 130
3. Dante’s partition of History p. 140
4. “Et miror si iam non est” p. 146
5. “Anciderà la fuia” p. 153
6. Antichrist p. 161
7. “Uno la fugge e altro la coarta” p. 167
8. Dante’s censure of Ubertino p. 173

Conclusions p. 185

Works Cited p. 187

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Acknowledgements
This dissertation could not have been finished without the support of many who, in different ways,
encouraged me to persevere whenever the wood seemed dark, and showed me the way towards
light. My years at graduate school were full of such Vergils. Some of their names are displayed
below, but others I prefer to keep in my heart, because their importance cannot be recognised by
everyone. Bu they know everything.
I am very grateful to Columbia University, to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and to the
Department of Italian at Columbia, for the continuous support I received during these years. I
would like to thank Professor Teodolinda Barolini, who always patiently guides and guided me from
the very beginning of my itinerarium mentis towards Dante, both through her words and her example.
I wish to warmly thank Professor Neslihan Senocak, who introduced me into the secrete cose of the
Franciscan friars. Professor Paolo Valesio who always stimulated in me a continuous desire for
knowledge and love for literature. Patrizio Ceccagnoli taught me to start reading books from the
end; I have never done it, for suspense’s sake, but I can be always sure that no different point of
view would go undervalued, with him.
My colleagues helped me in many circumstances, but as I was so very fortunate to have many, I limit
myself to mention Zane MacKin and Akash Kumar who, being American and having such a special
affection for Italy, taught me to love their country as much as I love mine.
To those who held my hand for any part of the journey goes my most sincere gratitude.

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Per Lauro e Anna

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Introduction
The main protagonists of my work are the Franciscan friar Ubertino da Casale, and the
Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. The first had been a lecturer at the studium generale of the Franciscan
Order in Florence during the time, or soon before, Dante had started to attend the “school of the
religious.” The routes of the friar and the poet meet again later, at the dawn of fourteenth century,
when the latter is sent to perpetual exile, and the former is forced to retire on Mount Alverna
because of his dangerous preaching in the center of Italy. In that span of years Dante starts writing
his famous poetic masterpiece, the Divine Comedy (along with other important works, such as the De
Vulgari Eloquentia and the Convivio), and his name spreads all throughout the courts of the north of
Italy. Ubertino writes an obscure semi-clandestine massive volume on the life of Christ, the Arbor
Vite Crucifixe Iesu, which ends with an exaltation of St. Francis as the Angel of the sixth seal of the
Apocalypse, and a violent attack against the popes Boniface VIII and Benedict XI, who are associated
with the mystical Antichrist. Dante mentions and quotes Ubertino in the Heaven of the Sun, that of
the spiriti sapienti, by the mouth of St. Bonaventure. But I argue in the third chapter of this work that
the influence of Ubertino is not limited to this part of Paradiso, considering that Ubertino is in fact
the ideological and aesthetical filter through which Dante absorbs, in some parts of his poem, the
ideas of Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, a Franciscan theologian whose commentary on the Apocalypse
(1297) had become highly controversial.
In the first part of this work I address the question of how Ubertino has been perceived by
Dante’s scholars, and I show how Ubertino, far from being studied and considered in his specificity,
first tended to disappear under the large umbrella of Joachism (during the first part of the twentieth
century), and was then dragged, especially thanks to the relentless work of Raoul Manselli, under the
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equally suffocating aegis of Pietro di Giovanni Olivi. Non-Italian scholars, such as Charles Davis,
Stan Benfell, and Nick Havely, while recognizing a larger independence of thought to Ubertino, find
it, however problematic, to draw a connection between him and Dante Alighieri, because the
apparent condemnation of the friar in Paradiso 12, by the mouth of St. Bonaventure, seemed to leave
no room for searching for connections beyond (what Umberto Bosco called) the “human
sympathy” that the poet had for the friar. Some, such as Manselli, even thought that Dante had in
fact no sympathy at all. My goal, however, is to move as much as possible away from moral
considerations.
In my second chapter I try to acknowledge Ubertino’s independence in an attempt to free
him from the overwhelming shade of Pietro di Giovanni Olivi. The result of my inquiry is two-fold.
On the one hand, I show that Ubertino was moving within a spiritual quest whose contours were
defined as much by Olivi as by some “practical teachers,” with whom he shares not only speculative
and exegetical concerns, but strongly historicized and down-to-earth considerations, which led him
to read the history of the Church with a pragmatic and militant perspective, and in which his private
personal experience plays a role as fundamental as in Dante’s pilgrimage to God in the Divine
Comedy. Furthermore, I underline how Ubertino’s spirituality is often expressed by means of literary
ambitions, as love, and I dare say, courtly language, not little times replaces academic formalisms. In
fact Ubertino’s multilingualism is as stunning as it is naïve, and displays theological technicalities
along with poetic expressions. In terms of literary source features, for example, next to Augustine
and the Pseudo-Dionysus, one can find a classical author such as Horace, whose presence is signaled
by a couple of quotation from the Ars Poetica. I also try to distinguish Ubertino from his closer and
most direct sources, especially Bonaventure and Pietro di Giovanni Olivi. While not rejecting their
teaching, it is interesting that Ubertino is most eager to take his distance from them, as he violently
attacks both Olivi and Bonaventure. The former, while abundantly used as a source for the fifth
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book, is accused of not having understood many things (which the readers should thus infer as
having been, by contrast, well understood by Ubertino, such as the identification of Boniface VIII
with the Antichrist). The second is accused of having disregarded, and thus implicitly of having
caused the loss, of important sources to reconstruct the true Francis. Ultimately Bonaventure is
accused of having provided a partial, and thus false, portrait of the founder. Ubertino of course
justifies himself in relying on heterodox as well as oral sources, as much as on Bonaventure’ official
Legenda.
In the third chapter I show how Dante integrates some of Ubertino’s major points as expressed in
his Arbor Vitae in the Commedia, such as the use of the metaphor of Tree, the characterization of
Boniface as illegitimate pastor, fraudulent deceiver, and usurper of the papal throne, and finally, the
bending of eschatology into ideology, and vice versa. I argue, at the end of my dissertation, that St.
Bonaventure’s condemnation of Ubertino should be correctly read as intentio operis rather than intentio
auctoris, and actually works as an ideological screen that eventually allows Dante to more easily
smuggle under the counter some of Ubertino’s most controversial theses.

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