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APPARENT AND HIDDEN MEANING

O voi che avete gl’intelletti sani, Mirate la dottrina che s’asconde Sotto il velame delli versi strani!

 
     With these words¹ Dante indicates quite explicitly that there is a hidden and, properly speaking, doctrinal significance to his work, whose external and apparent meaning is only a veil that must be penetrated by those who would understand it. Elsewhere the poet goes still further, declaring that all writings, and not only sacred ones, can be understood and must be explained principally according to four levels of meaning: si possono intendere e debbonsi sponere massimamente per quattro sensi.² It is evident moreover that these diverse meanings cannot in any way neutralize or oppose each other, but on the contrary must complete each other, harmonizing like the parts within a whole or as constituent elements of one single synthesis.
 
     There is thus no doubt whatsoever that the Divine Comedy in its entirety can be interpreted in several senses, for we have in this regard the testimony of its author, who is certainly better qualified than anyone else to inform us of his own intentions. The difficulty begins only when it comes to determining these different meanings, especially the highest or the most profound, and it is here that different points of view naturally arise among commentators. They all generally agree on recognizing beneath the literal meaning in poetic narrative a philosophical (or rather, philosophico-theological) meaning, and also a political and social one; however, counting the literal meaning, this still makes only three, and Dante advises us to look for a fourth meaning. What can it be? For us, it can only be a properly initiatic meaning, metaphysical in its essence, to which are related numerous facts, equally esoteric in character though not all of a purely metaphysical order. It is precisely owing to its esoteric character that this profounder level of meaning has completely escaped most commentators. Yet if one ignores it, or perhaps fails to recognize it, the other levels of meaning can themselves only be partially grasped, for this fourth, or initiatic, meaning stands to the others as their principle, in which their multiplicity is coordinated and unified.
 
     Even those who have glimpsed the esoteric side of Dante’s work have committed many mistakes with respect to its true nature, for they have usually lacked a real understanding of these things, and their interpretations have been affected by prejudices that they found impossible to lay aside. Thus it is that Rossetti and Aroux, who were among the first to point out the existence of this esoterism, could conclude that Dante was guilty of ‘heresy’, not realizing that they were mixing together considerations relating to altogether different domains; so that, although they knew certain things, there were many others they did not know, and which we shall attempt to point out without in any way claiming to give a complete exposition of a subject that indeed seems truly inexhaustible.
 
     The question for Aroux was whether Dante was Catholic or Albigensian. For others it seems rather to be whether he was Christian or pagan.³ For our part, we do not think that such a point of view is necessary, for true esoterism is something completely different from outward religion, and if it has some relationship with it, this can only be insofar as it finds a symbolic mode of expression in religious forms. Moreover, it matters little whether these forms be of this or that religion, since what is involved is the essential doctrinal unity concealed beneath their apparent diversity. This is why in the past initiates participated in all forms of worship, following the customs established in whatever country they happened to be. Dante also understood this fundamental unity, and for this reason, and not by virtue of any superficial ‘syncretism’, he employed indifferently a terminology borrowed from Christianity and Greco-Roman antiquity as circumstances required. Pure metaphysics is neither pagan nor Christian, but universal; the ancient mysteries were not paganism, but were superimposed upon it.⁴ In the same way there were in the Middle Ages some organizations of an initiatic, and not religious, character, but which took Catholicism as their base. If Dante belonged to some of these organizations, which seems to us indisputable, this is no reason to declare him a ‘heretic’. Those who think in this way give proof of a false or incomplete idea of the Middle Ages; they see only the outer aspect of things so to speak, because for all other aspects terms of comparison are no longer to be found in the modern world.
 
     Such being the real character of all initiatic organizations, there were only two cases where an accusation of ‘heresy’ might have been leveled at some of them, or at least at some of their members, and this in order to conceal other grounds for complaint that were much more legitimate, but which could not be expressed openly. In the first case certain initiates indulged in inopportune disclosures, risking both a disturbance in minds as yet unprepared for knowledge of higher truths, and also provoking disorder at the social level. The authors of such disclosures erred in creating a confusion of the esoteric and the exoteric orders, a confusion that sufficiently justified the reproach of ‘heresy’. This situation has arisen on a number of occasions in Islam,⁵ where, however, the esoteric schools do not normally encounter any hostility at the hand of the religious and judicial authorities representing exoterism. In the second case, the same accusation was simply taken as a pretext by a political power to destroy adversaries thought all the more formidable for being so difficult to reach by ordinary means. The destruction of the Order of the Temple is the most celebrated instance of this type, and this event has a direct connection with the subject of the present study.


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[1] Inferno, IX, 36-16. [All citations from The Divine Comedy in the text and appended to notes are taken from John Ciardi’s translation (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1977). Emphasis is always Guénon’s. In the Ciardi translation, the lines are always numbered 58-60. Ed.]

Men of sound intellect and probity, Weigh with good understanding what lies hidden Behind the veil of my strange allegory!

[2] Convivio, t. II, chap. 1. ‘They may be understood, and they must be explained in four senses.’
[3] Cf. Arturo Reghini, ‘L’Allegoria esoterica di Dante’, in Nouvo Patto, September-November 1921, pp. 541-548.
[4] We must say that we would prefer another word to ‘paganism’, which has been imposed by long usage but was originally only a term of contempt applied to the Greco-Roman religion in the last stage of its decadence, where it was reduced to the state of simple popular ‘superstition’.
[5] We make particular allusion to the celebrated example of Al-Hallaj, who was put to death in Baghdad in the year 903 of the Hegira (AD 921), and whose memory is venerated even by those who think he was justly condemned for his imprudent disclosures.