Otfried,

Thank you for the many good references.  I have Steve Botterill's book on
Bernard, and I also want to read his translation of De Monarchia, mostly
because I was interested to hear that Dante argues for the separation of
Church and state. 

> But Trajan
>  and, of course, Maimonides had lived and died **after** the descent of
>  Christ and by consequence could not be saved at this descent. Trajan, a
case
>  similar to Ripheus and Cato because normally not eligible for salvation,
was
>  saved by an act of divine grace on the instances of Gregory the Great (and
>  after having first spent some time in hell). It is true that Dante could
>  have invented a similar act of grace for some Jew like Maimonides, but I
>  would restrain from drawing conclusions from the fact that he did not
invent
>  such a story.

I'm very confused about Trajan. In comparing him to Hezekiah, Dante brings
out that Hezekiah prayed, as if this were a gesture that showed he had better
insight than Trajan.  But Hezekiah was praying as a Hebrew, not as a
Christian or to the Trinitarian Christian God.  This is part of what made me
wonder if Dante is following Augustine by having  3 categories rather than 2.
 If Dante is saying that the Hebrews (Jews) had a wrong conception of God
because they did not see him as Trinitiarian, but at least they had a
conception of a monotheistic God, which was more than the pagans had.
 Probably Trajan prayed too, but to the gods and goddesses of ancient Rome,
who as you say don't seem to count for anything. 

I put a lot of weight on Golden Legend, partly because I understand it to
have been the most widely circulated book (except for the Bible) of the
middle ages.  I think Dante changed the story of Trajan and the widow, just
as he changed the story of the harrowing of hell from what appears in the
Gospel of Nicodemus.  I believe in Golden Legend Trajan does <not> get off
his horse to help the widow, because he's on his way to a war which he sees
as a greater priority. 

I have Singleton. But primarily I was sticking closely to the Temple Classics
edition of Commedia.  It may not be the best translation, and the annotation
(Wicksteed and Oelsner) is very uneven.  But it's the edition Eliot is known
to have used, and to have read many times. The TC annotators say Trajan was
saved partly through Gregory's prayers, partly because he was kind (to the
widow?).  Eliot's The Hippopotamus is basically a modernized take-off on
Saint Peter's complaints about the Church, or about certain Popes. A hippo
gets thrown in from the book of Job (behemoth),  and proves to be more
redeemable than the Church or True Church. But I was interested in an
epigraph to the poem that gives a long passage from Saint Ignatius' letter to
the Trallians, wirtten when Ignatius was on his way to be martyred.  

Golden Legend identifies Trajan as personally supervising the torture of
Saint Ignatius, and being particularly brutal.  So I thought maybe Eliot used
that material in part because he  disagreed with Wicksteed and Oelsner on the
issue of whether Trajan was kind.  The story of Gregory praying for Trajan
turns up in several versions.  In one, and I think this might have been
mentioned in GL, Gregory gets his wish but is punished himself because he
should not have been praying for the salvation of a pagan.  Makes sense if it
means that Christians can pray for pagans to be converted to Christianity,
but should not ask that they be saved <without> converting to Christianity.
  Also, Gregory may have been confused in thinking Trajan was kind, or so the
Ignatius episode may suggest.  I thought the salvation of Trajan might be
 almost as opaque as that of Ripheus.  That Trajan was a very bad person,
even though Gregory may have mistakenly thought otherwise, and we can't
really know why he was saved (because we can't understand the mind of God).
 The obvious contrast is Virgil, who seems much more worthy than Trajan, yet
is not saved.

What I want to ask you about is Dante changing the story of Trajan and the
widow, so that Trajan gets off his horse to help the widow.  W&O say that
Dante makes many mistakes (or faux mistakes) in Inferno, as if being in hell
confused his thinking.  He mind becomes clearer, they say,  as he reaches
Paradise.  But what about Purgatorio?  Does he also make mistakes there?  I
find Dante playing a lot with the device of the omniscient reader, who knows
or ought to know more than the characters in the text.  I was trying to
imagine how the Trajan episode would sound to a hypothetical reader of
Dante's day who knew the stories in GL from that source or some other.  The
reader might recognize that Dante's retelling of the story is "erroneous,"
that Trajan did <not> help the widow, that Trajan was not kind (Ignatius),
that Gregory may have been mistaken in thinking Trajan was kind, that it any
case it's not clear (in other versions of the story) that Gregory was doing
the right thing, and that the "reasons" for Trajan's salvation may not be as
clear as they seem.  What I'd be interested in knowing is whether the
"mistakes" in Inferno are supposed to continue in Purgatorio...or even in
Paradiso because I'm noticing faux mistakes there.  As in the conversation
with James.  

If "errors" run through all 3 Canticas, I would assume Dante might be playing
with the idea that to err is human--that human beings never fully understand
because our minds lack the perfection of the mind of God.

>But I am not aware that Bernard had a medieval fame of
>being specifically hostile to Jews (not to speak of "antisemitism").

Usually remarks about Bernard and the Jews turn up more in writings by
historians than in the Dante literature, so perhaps it wasn't thought to have
any relevance to Commedia.  The story I see retold most often is about
Anaclete, who was of Jewish ethnic extraction, wanting to be Pope.  Bernard
is supposed to have said it would be a disgrace for a Jew (or an ethnic Jew)
to sit on the throne of Saint Peter.  The anecdote is so strange I wish I
could find its source.  Assuming that Bernard actually said this, how could
he have forgotten that Saint Peter himself was an ethnic Jew, or a Jewish
(not Gentile) convert to Christianity?  

Could have been the kind of story that developed at a later date because
people thought it was the kind of thing Bernard would have said.  An
encyclical of Pope Benedict XIV, from the late 1700s (on Jews and Christians
Living in the same place) urges the clergy of Poland to be more diligent in
keeping Jews away from Christians, and approvingly quotes Bernard for his
essentially negative ideas about Jews.  So a Jew-hating Pope correctly or
incorrectly thought that his own views were just a restatement of Bernard's
views.  This got me curious enough to check both the 1913 and 1955 editions
of the Catholic Encyclopedia.  The 1913 ed. is quite outspoken about how
wicked Anaclete was--and that he was Jewish.  Maybe we're supposed to read
between the lines and understand that Bernard was correct to oppose
him--either for being wicked or for being Jewish.  

The 1955 ed. made me wonder whether Bernard on the Jews had become an
embarrassment to the Church at some time during the 20th century.  A story
suddenly appears--no source given--that Bernard really loved the Jews. He got
out of his sick-bed to protect the Jews of Germany from a savage persecution.
 Doesn't sound like the same Bernard mentioned in Benedict's encyclical, and
maybe the story is a late attempt to modify Bernard's reputation.  
Steve knows the original documents on this, so I hope he'll sort out the
threads.  I liked his book on Bernard a lot, but it was mostly about Bernard
as a mystic.  I doubt one needs a whole book on Bernard and the Jews, though
a paper or some notes would certainly be interesting.  

Your point about Caiphas being arranged on the ground as if he were crucified
is important, and of course you're right that it's an allusion to the
crucifixion.  I also agree with you completely on the importance of the
eschatological.  I'm just not certain what some of it means.  If the Jews are
to convert at the end of time, it sounds as if somebody is being given a
special dispensation, and I'm not sure who.  Is this to satisfy the desire of
Christians that everyone should agree on the need for baptism? Or is it a
dispensation to the Jews, allowing them to be saved at the 11th hour?  Also,
why just the Jews? Why aren't Muslims to convert to Christianity at the end
of time?  I'm sure the answer is hidden somewhere in the theological
literature.

On the gap you mention in Dante's treatment of modern Jews--that they don't
seem to turn up anywhere, regardless of what Bernard has to say--it might be
just that, a gap.  My feeling that it might be only an apparent gap--that
there might be some small details thus far overlooked that will bear on
it--comes partly from a sense of Dante's symmetry.  I don't have a sense that
he leaves gaps. But of course this is a subjective feeling, so maybe it is
just a gap.
 
pat sloane









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