Dante's Vernacular Fire: Grassi on Renaissance Poetics as Historical Knowledge

In his Renaissance Humanism, Grassi (1998) shows that several centuries before the appearance of Vico’s philosophy, a significant alternative to the traditional view of philosophical reasoning was emerging. The purpose of a philosophy of knowledge in that traditional view was to determine those “essences” of being that could be shown to be permanent and universal features of the mind - the conceptual "fixtures” which resist the purely empirical variations of history and custom. Such variations were condemned as inessential since no universality could be ascribed to them, as could be ascribed to essential knowledge.

The purpose of the language of philosophy, therefore, is to reflect upon those rationally established universal meanings. Such a view prevails in Dante’s ‘De Monarchia’, in which he argues for the idea of a universal monarch who, unlike individual kings, rules over the whole world with all its differences. Grassi comments: “In other words, it is the historical function of the universal monarch to see to it that no history will be made” (1998, p. 7). However, in his ‘De Vulgara Eloquentia’, Dante, whilst not relinquishing the idea of a universal language (he believed Latin to be such a language, since it prevails throughout the great variety of national languages), argues the need for an historical language that captures the sense of the language used in everyday life.

The everyday language of the here and now, he says, is the “fire” with which is forged the instrument that enables us to create our own, human world. This is the “fire” that burns in poetry and rhetoric. These are the disciplines which enlarge and illuminate our being as humans, who feel and think and attempt to draw some meaning that may inform our lives. This is Dante’s mission as a poet: to reveal, through his use of the historical vernacular in his poetry, the hidden gifts of language that make a common sense of the secular and the sacred.

The power of the poetic, he says, has four interrelated aspects. First, it illuminates reality, so that a situation or event can appear in its true significance as that which enlivens and concentrates lived reality. Secondly, it is “cardinal”: it works within and enhances the idiom - the vernacular - that provides the common linguistic-symbolic framework of a society. The third quality is that of its being aulica: the aula is the central place or court of a community, developed through the unified action of illumination and cardinality. Finally, curialatas indicates the place where explicit laws are established for a community.

Dante’s description of the formation of agreed norms and the laws corresponding to them is a remarkable anticipation of the significance that Vico attached to the poetic in its contribution it the sensus communis - the established, though flexible, norms underlying everyday social intercourse. Grassi acknowledges the significance of Dante’s foresight as that of our becoming aware of the difference between the traditional conception of a universal language, which is necessarily non-historical, and a poetic language that “forges ahead in its ever-changing historical nature” (Grassi, 1998, p. 10). We witness a new direction for thought, one that begins with the word, that is, with the nature of language, rather than that which addresses the nature of being as the logical prerequisite of language.

Similarly, Leonardo Bruni emphasises that the same expression can have different meaning in different contexts, and that, therefore, a word may not have a fixed and definite meaning determined by rational thought. Instead, their characteristic attribute is that of mollitia, that is a flexibility or suppleness, which allows words to be transferred from one situation to the next. Such transfer marks the essential nature of metaphor: when “I see red”, it could be an expression of my anger, or the need to stop at a traffic light, or my attempt at painting a fire. Pastoureau in his History of the Colour Red, says:

For the historian, colour is defined first as a social phenomenon, not as a material or component of light, still less as a sensation. It is the society that makes colour, that gives its vocabulary and its definitions, that constructs its codes and values, that organises its uses and determines its stakes. This why any history of colour must be a social history”. (2007, p. 9)

It is a history which reveals a variety of meanings generated by the variety of situations to which the same word is applied. As such, it requires the investigator to explore the different meanings and values attached to the word within its social context. The transfer of a word from one situation to another does not require a logical analysis, since the differences have a social and, therefore, rhetorical origin. Therefore, Bruni maintains, we are no longer searching for a word’s meaning by placing it within a single, defining category. Rather, we explain its significance in terms of the contexts which face human existence. Does this, as Bruno’s critics were quick to point out, signify a lapse into relativism, an acknowledgment only of a variety of meanings which possesses no coherence? It does not. For the accusation fails to recognise the significance of the context or situation in which a word is used. Words express and receive their significance within their human contexts, those of survival and work, birth and marriage, life and death, self and community, the making of laws - in general, in our search for the values which sustain us both as individuals and as social beings. This is the poetic, existential nature of language as speech directed simultaneously to oneself and to the other. It is this perspective that underlies Vico’s historical account of forms of society in which each form is guided by a central myth, first, that of the gods, then that of the “heroes” who govern, and, finally, that of an equality whose rhetoric has lost its poetic and philosophical nature.

The public rhetoric of modernity betrays the inherent purposes of poetry and philosophy. Ignoring these purposes, rhetoric descends into a mere persuasiveness that lacks poetic enlightenment and philosophical concern. A philosophical rhetoric looks to philosophy for the validations of truth of argument and moral concern, alongside the poetic narrative which incorporates reason and evidence. Rhetoric requires the flexibility of ingenuity which has the agility to respond to the variety of situations thrown up within the variety of circumstance. An essential feature of this rhetoric is the use of metaphor since metaphor has the agility to leap from one perception to another. For example, to assert that “life is green” or “his mind is a prison” may be incorporated in an argument for the innocence and creativity of a young mind or for the stultifying pressure of an enclosed mind. Poetry and rhetoric carry you forward in deepening and extending your sense of an experience.

This idea is central to the work of Coluccio Salutati, for whom the ingenious finding of similarities that belong to metaphor is the foundation of rationality; thought based upon classificatory logic is a secondary occurrence: finding instances of a class presumes the initial foundation of a guiding idea. Thinking begins with examples and their implications. This is Kant’s distinction between a determinate concept, whose parts are enclosed within a general name, for example, shirts, shoes and hats are all clothing), and indeterminate concepts (such as calling the mind a prison) leaves the similitude open for further thinking. Grassi quotes Salutati:

From the height of their ingenious the seers [the poets] observe three things through which they illuminate their poems as with lights, God, the world, and everything animate, in order to give a name to everything which is called a living being...Because (the poets) observe that God, the builder of the world, has accomplished everything in his wisdom...and that wisdom is nothing but the godhead itself, they called the god by different names, although they felt he was one and the same. No one, therefore, should be in any doubt that, in spite of the great number of gods, the poets never thought of many gods, they gave the one god different names in his tasks, times, and places. (1998, pp. 35-36)

In the work of Giovanni Pontano the poetic world is original, that is, originating. Illumination occurs through the experience of admirable and astounding events and takes the form of a “pointing" to those events. For example, he argues, that when Virgil described the eruption of Mount Etna, he is not aiming to portray the reality “as it is", but to illuminate the experience of the eruption - a phenomenology - through, in the first place, the loudness of the explosion, then building upon our sense experiences so that the reader may feel the full force of the event. The poetic, he says, is wondrous but unfathomable. As with all aesthetic wholes, our capacity for wonder and admiration comes only though our immersion in portrayed events, which open up a “clearing" in the forest of perceptions. Pontano argues that the poetic is an essential aspect of the persuasive nature of rhetoric, lending its force to forensic and political judgments. But he lambasts the speech of those rhetoricians who separate rhetoric from philosophy and who, consequently, are liable to be swayed by popular prejudices which have no place within philosophy.

The rhetoric within philosophy is the philosophy within rhetoric. Similarly, there exists in historical analysis a synergy between the rhetorical poetic and the factual. He acknowledges the importance of causal factors - a famine that precipitates unrest, the whims of a dictator, and so forth - but insists that the historian must also consider the actors’ evaluation of their situation. The historical account must, therefore, consist of both the elucidation of the situation in its causal sequence and also an account of the interpretive ingenuity of the participants specific to their situation.