Dante's Multitudes

The most faraway and exotic peoples referred to in the Commedia, and always coordinated as though to acknowledge their similar otherness, are the Indians and the Ethiopians, as black Africans were called. The coordination of Indians and Ethiopians may have been suggested to Dante by Aristotle’s On Sophistical Refutations, chapter 5, which I propose as the source of Dante’s practice in “Dante Squares the Circle: Textual and Philosophical Affinities of Monarchia and Paradiso,” in this volume. Later on in the very canto that challenges divine justice with respect to the man born on the banks of the Indus we learn that there will be Ethiopians nearer to God at the Judgment Day than many Christians:

Ma vedi: molti gridan “Cristo, Cristo!”,

che saranno in giudicio assai men prope

a lui, che tal che non conosce Cristo;

e tai Cristian dannerà l’Etïòpe,

quando si partiranno i due collegi,

l’uno in etterno ricco e l’altro inòpe.

(Par. 19.106–11)

[But there are many who now cry “Christ! Christ!”

who at the Final Judgment shall be far

less close to Him than one who knows not Christ;

the Ethiopian will shame such Christians

when the two companies are separated,

the one forever rich, the other poor.]

We can contrast Dante’s provocative remark on the possibility of saved Ethiopians, all the more provocative for coming in a heaven in which he has gone out of his way to draw attention to an exotic saved figure from the deep eastern past, Ripheus the Trojan, to Strickland’s contention that “Ethiopians and demons are . . . dramatically allied in pictorial works of art.” To make this point she offers an image of Blemmyai, one of the monstrous races, and Ethiopians en route to Antichrist, and an image of an Ethiopian, Saracen, and Jew adoring Antichrist (fig. 2.14).

To create a richer context for the understanding of “Ethiopian” in Dante’s Italy (an Italy that did not know Greek and that had not yet rediscovered Herodotus and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica), we can consider three Italian references slightly later than the Commedia. In the Latin life of San Pier Pettinaio da Siena (d. 1289), written by the Franciscan Pietro da Montarone in 1330, Ethiopians are explicitly linked to demons: “When he came near the church he saw two demons, in the horrifying shape of Ethiopians.” In Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo (mid-fourteenth century), Ethiopians are a “gente bestiale e senza legge” (a bestial people without laws), entirely given over to the “piacer di Venere” (pleasures of Venus); while in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio (perhaps as late as 1360s) female lust is so insatiable that it stoops even to the black Ethiopian: “La loro lussuria è focosa e insaziabile, e per questo non patisce né numero né elezione: il fante, il lavoratore, il mugnaio e ancora il nero etiopo, ciascuno è buono, sol che possa” (Women’s lust is fiery and insatiable and for this reason knows no discrimination or bounds: the servant, the workman, the miller, even the black Ethiopian, each is good provided he is up to it [par. 224]). All of these references are a far cry from “tai Cristian dannerà l’Etïòpe” of Par. 19.109. Whether one takes the passage in Paradiso 19 restrictively, to mean that the virtuous but damned heathens will castigate the damned Christians who neglected to hear the gospel and to be saved, or—as I prefer—expansively, to mean that through their meritorious works pagans (like Ripheus!) may yet be saved, in either case Dante’s passage is one that dignifies the Ethiopian.

The various forms of sympathy toward the other that we have considered could be arranged on a spectrum: from the profound psychological identification that causes Dante to faint after meeting Francesca, to his assertive dignifying of the Ethiopian and his ability actively to imagine the salvation of sodomites and pagans, to his demonstrable lack of interest in stereotyping ethnic groups different from his own, such as the Jews. Behind these various forms of sympathy toward the other is an imagination captivated by difference, not only by the “gloria di colui che tutto move” (The glory of the One who moves all things [Par. 1.1]) but also by the process whereby that glory is differentiated “in una parte più e meno altrove” (in one part more and in another less [Par. 1.3]). When Dante reaches the end of his vision and is granted the sight of the universe bound together in one volume, what entrances him is not plain oneness but all that multiplicity somehow contained and unified. His heart is set on seeing and knowing that multiplicity, an otherness that is still stubbornly present in the poem’s penultimate word: God is the love that moves the sun and the other stars—“l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Par. 33.145; emphasis mine). Much has been written about the transcendent stelle with which the Commedia ends; let us give due weight as well to the adjective that modifies those stars, the poem’s penultimate word, altre. Dante may believe in a transcendent One, but his One is indelibly characterized by the multiplicity, difference, and sheer otherness embodied in the “altre stelle”—an otherness by which he is still unrepentantly captivated in his poem’s last breath.