Let us, then, attempt an alternative translation:
And it is precisely this form that all speakers would use in their language, if it had not been dismembered through the fault of human presumption, as we shall demonstrate below. This is the linguistic form in which Adam spoke: all of his descendants spoke thanks to this form until the building of the Tower of Babel—which is interpreted as the tower of confusion: this was the linguistic form that the sons of Eber, who were called Hebrews after their father, inherited. To them alone it remained after the confusion, so that our Redeemer, who was to be born of them through the human side of his nature, should enjoy, not a tongue of confusion, but a tongue of grace. It was, then, the Hebrew language that the lips of the first speaker framed.
What, however, is this linguistic form that is not the Hebrew language nor the general faculty of language and which was given to Adam as a divine gift but lost after Babel—and which Dante, as we shall see, is endeavoring to rediscover with his theory of the illustrious vernacular?
Corti (1981: 46 et seq.) has suggested a solution to the problem, based on the principle that Dante cannot be understood if he is seen simply as an orthodox follower of the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Dante appeals, depending on the circumstances, to various philosophical and theological sources, and there can be no doubt that he was influenced by various strands of that so-called radical Aristotelianism whose major representative was Siger of Brabant (whom Dante places in the Heaven of the Sun). But Boethius of Dacia too, one of the major representatives of the Modistae grammarians (and also in the Heaven of the Sun), was associated with the circles of radical Aristotelianism (and like Siger incurred the condemnation of the bishop of Paris in 1277). Dante is alleged to have been influenced by his De modis significandi. Corti sees the Bologna of his time as the seedbed from which these influences were passed on to Dante, either as a result of a personal stay there or through contacts between Bolognese and Florentine intellectual circles.
If such were the case, it would become clearer what Dante meant by “forma locutionis.” It was the Modistae who argued for the existence of linguistic universals, that is, for a set of rules underlying the formation of any natural language. In the De modis, Boethius observes that it is possible to extract, from all existing languages, the rules of a universal grammar, distinct from either Latin or Greek grammar (Quaestio VI).
What God gave to Adam, then, was not the mere faculty for language, and not even a natural language, but the principles of a universal grammar, the formal cause, “the general structuring principle of language both as regards lexicon and as regards the morphological and syntactic characters of language, which Adam will frame little by little, as he goes on living and giving names to things” (Corti 1981: 47).5 The forma locutionis given to him by God could be understood as a sort of innate mechanism reminiscent of the same universal principles studied in Chomsky’s generative grammar.
It seems likely, then, that Dante believed that, with Babel, what had disappeared was the perfect forma locutionis—the only form that would permit the creation of languages capable of reflecting the very essence of things (the identity between modi essendi and modi significandi), of which the Hebrew spoken by Adam was the incomparable and perfect result—and that the surviving formae locutionis were incoherent and imperfect—just like the Italian vernaculars whose inability to express lofty and profound thought is pilloried by the poet.
If this is how the DVE is to be read, we can finally understand the nature of that illustrious vernacular that Dante claims to be tracking down like a perfumed panther, “whose scent is left everywhere but which is nowhere to be seen” (DVE I, xvi, 1).6 It shows up here and there in the texts of the poets whom Dante considers major, but it still appears to be unformed, unregulated, unarticulated in its grammatical principles. Confronted with the existing vernaculars, natural but not universal, and with a universal but artificial grammar, Dante pursues the dream of a restoration of the Edenic forma locutionis, which is both natural and universal. Unlike many men of the Renaissance, however, who will go in search of a Hebrew language restored to its revelatory and magical powers, Dante’s goal is to recreate the original conditions with an act of modern invention. The illustrious vernacular is to be a poetic language, his language, and it will be the means by which a modern poet is able to heal the post-Babelic wound. The whole of the second book of the DVE is not to be read as a mere treatise on style, but as an effort to create the conditions, the rules, the forma locutionis of the only conceivable perfect language, the Italian of Dante’s poetry (Corti 1981: 70). This illustrious vernacular will possess the necessity (as opposed to the conventionality) of the original perfect language, because, just as the forma locutionis allowed Adam to speak with God, the illustrious vernacular will allow the poet to make his words equal to the task of expressing what they have to express, which would otherwise be inexpressible.
This is why, instead of condemning the multiplicity of languages, Dante stresses their ability to renew themselves over time. It is on the basis of this faith in the creativity of language that he can aspire to invent a modern perfect language, without going hunting for lost models. If Dante had really thought that the Hebrew invented by Adam was the only perfect language, he would have done all he could to write his poem in Hebrew. The only reason he did not do so is because he thought that the vernacular he was called upon to invent would correspond to the God-given principles of universal form better than Adam’s Hebrew had. Dante, with characteristic chutzpah, steps up to the plate as the new Adam.
7.2. Paradiso XXVI
If we turn now from the DVE to Canto XXVI of Paradiso (several years have gone by between the two), it looks as if Dante changed his mind. In the DVE it was unambiguously affirmed that Hebrew sprang as a perfect language from the God-given forma locutionis, and that was the language in which Adam addressed God, calling him El. In Paradiso XXVI, 124–138, however, Adam says:
La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta
innanzi che a l’ovra inconsummabile
fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta:
ché nullo effetto mai razïonabile,
per lo piacere uman che rinovella
seguendo il cielo, sempre fu durabile.
Opera naturale è ch’uom favella;
ma così o così, natura lascia
poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella.7
Pria ch’i’ scendessi a l’infernale ambascia,
I s’appellava in terra il sommo bene
onde vien la letizia che mi fascia;
e EL si chiamò poi: e ciò convene,
ché l’uso d’i mortali è come fronda
in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.8
Adam affirms, not only that, born out of a natural disposition for speech, languages subsequently become distinguished from each other and grow and change thanks to human initiative, but also that the Hebrew spoken before the building of the Tower of Babel was no longer the same language that he had spoken in the Earthly Paradise. In Eden Adam had called God I, whereas later he was called El.
Saying that, by the time of the tower, Adam’s Hebrew was a lost language might simply be a way to justify Genesis 10. But what is most striking is the odd notion that God might once have been called I, a choice that none of Dante’s commentators has ever succeeded in explaining satisfactorily.
It has been suggested that I stands for the Roman numeral corresponding to the Arab numeral 1, and that it symbolizes therefore the perfect unity of God, but elsewhere in Paradiso (XIX, 128), the Roman numeral I stands for the smallest of quantities and is opposed to M, which stands instead for 1,000; it does not seem likely, then, that the poet would decide to designate the divinity with a numeral that indicates a minimal value.
A second interpretation appears to be inspired by a curious case of linguistic ethnocentrism—the conviction, that is, that there exists only one language and it is the most perfect one. The last thirteen cantos of Dorothy Sayers’s English translation of the Comedy were completed after her death by Barbara Reynolds. Lines 133–136 of Canto XXVI in Reynolds’s version read as follows:
Ere I descended to the pains of Hell
Jah was the name men called the highest Good
Which swathes me in this joy. Thereafter El
His title was on earth.…
Clearly, if Dante’s I had been preserved in the English, it might have been mistaken for the first person singular pronoun. It is understandable, then, that the translator should have changed it to Jah. We might be tempted to believe that Jah is simply the first syllable of Jahveh, if it were not for Reynolds’s footnote, which suggests that Dante must have been thinking of Psalm 68:4, which she naturally cites in the King
