Once again, we find that the positions of Abulafia and Dante have something in common. For Abulafia there existed an equation between the Torah and the Active Intellect, and the schema according to which God had created the world coincided with the linguistic gift he had given to Adam, a kind of generative matrix of all languages that did not yet coincide with Hebrew. We find, then, on the one hand, Averroistic influences in Abulafia, which lead him to believe in a single Active Intellect common to all mankind, and, on the other, undeniable and proven Averroistic sympathies in Dante—the conception, for instance, that Nardi (1985: ch. V) sees as having its origins in Avicenna and Augustine, of a divine Wisdom that offers its forms to the Possible Intellect. The Modistae too (especially the group based in Bologna) and other defenders of a universal grammar were no strangers to the Averroistic tradition. So here we have a shared philosophical position that (without insisting on a direct influence) might incline both thinkers to consider the gift of tongues as the handing-down of a forma locutionis, a generative matrix comparable to the Active Intellect.
This is not all. Historically speaking, Hebrew, for Abulafia, had been the protolanguage, but the Chosen People, in the course of the Diaspora, had forgotten that original language. Therefore, as Dante will say in the Paradiso, at the time of the confusion of Babel the tongue of Adam was “all extinct.” Idel (1989) quotes an unpublished manuscript by a disciple of Abulafia which says:
Anyone who believes in the creation of the world, if he believes that languages are conventional, he must also believe that they are of two types: the first is Divine, i.e., agreement between God and Adam, and the second is natural, i.e., based on agreement between Adam, Eve and their children. The second is derived from the first, and the first was only known to Adam and was not passed on to any of his offspring except for Seth, whom he bore in his likeness and his form. And so, the tradition reached Noah. And the confusion of the tongues during the generation of the dispersion [at the tower of Babel] occurred only to the second type of language, i.e., to the natural language. (Idel 1989: 17)
If we bear in mind that the term “tradition” refers to the Kabbalah, then the passage quoted is once more alluding to a linguistic knowledge, to a forma locutionis as a collection of rules for the construction of different languages.
If the original form is not a language, but the universal matrix of all languages, this confirms the historical mutability of Hebrew itself, but also the hope that that original form can be rediscovered and made to bear fruit once again (in different ways, obviously, for Dante and Abulafia).
All these remarks would make more sense if it could be demonstrated that Dante was familiar with Hebrew Kabbalistic thought and with Abulafia in particular.
Abulafia had come to Rome in 1260 and had stayed on in Italy until 1271, when he returned to Rome with the idea of converting the pope. Then he continued on to Sicily, where we lose track of him toward the end of the 1290s. His ideas, then, undoubtedly influenced Italian Jewish circles. In fact in 1290 we witness a debate between Hillel of Verona (who probably met Abulafia twenty years earlier) and Zerakhya of Barcelona, who arrived in Italy at the beginning of the 1270s (cf. Genot-Bismuth 1988: ch. II). Hillel, who had been frequenting intellectual circles in Bologna, writes to Zerakhya with a question first broached by Herodotus, that is, what language would a child brought up deprived of linguistic stimuli express itself in? For Hillel (who appears not to be aware, or chooses to ignore, that Abulafia had been of a different opinion), the child would express itself in the same Hebrew that had originally been given to man as part of his very nature. In his reply Zerakhya accuses him of having surrendered to the sirens of the “uncircumscised” of Bologna. The sounds produced by a child who had not been exposed to a linguistic education, he objects, would be similar to the barking of a dog, and it cannot be argued that the sacred language was given to man by his very nature, because the aptitude man possesses for language is merely potential, and the only way he learns to speak is through the education of his phonatory organs.13
This exchange is sufficient to demonstrate that Abulafia’s themes were debated on the Italian peninsula, to be precise in the same Bolognese circles that influenced Dante (and where, according to Corti (1981), he might have picked up a number of ideas concerning the forma locutionis). But the research of Genot-Bismuth supplies additional details about the period, in which we encounter a certain Yehudi Romano, who lectured to his coreligionists on Dante’s Comedy, or Lionello di Ser Daniele who will do likewise, using a copy of the Comedy transliterated into Hebrew, to say nothing of a figure like Immanuel of Rome who, in his own poetic compositions, seems almost to parody Dante’s themes, as if he were nursing the ambition of writing an anti-Comedy in Hebrew.14
We are not talking simply about the influence of Dante on Italian Jewish circles. Genot-Bismuth proves that the influences went both ways, going so far as to posit a Jewish origin for the theory of the four senses of Scripture mentioned in Dante’s Epistle XIII—a bold thesis, when we think of the abundance of Christian sources Dante had at his disposal on that subject. Far less extravagant, and in many ways more convincing, is her thesis that Dante may have caught echoes of the Hillel-Zerakhya polemic in Bologna in the years following.
We might conclude that in the DVE Dante comes close to the position espoused by Hillel (or by Hillel’s Christian inspirers, as Zerakhya suggested in his rebuttal), while in Paradiso XXVI he has become converted to Zerakhya’s thesis, which was also that of Abulafia—though it is also true that, by the time he came to write the DVE, Dante could already have been familiar with both opinions.
Though Genot-Bismuth is able to document in detail a number of Jewish contributions to historiography that would appear as echoes and suggestions in the De regimine principium of Giles of Rome, it is enough for our purposes to recognize the existence of an intellectual climate in which ideas circulated as part of a constant polemic, made up of written and oral debates, between Church and Synagogue (cf. Calimani 1987: ch. VIII). Assuredly if, before the Renaissance, a Christian thinker had come close to embracing Hebrew doctrine, he would never have admitted it publicly. Like the Christian heretics, the Jewish community belonged—as Le Goff (1988) cogently puts it—to a category of outcasts that the official Middle Ages seemed to detest and admire simultaneously, with a mixture of fascination and fear, keeping them at a distance, but making sure the distance was close enough for the outcasts to be within reach. “What it called its charity towards them was like the attitude of a cat playing with a mouse” (Le Goff 1988: 316).
Before its rehabilitation by the Humanists, Christian notions of the Kaballah were hazy, and it tended to be lumped together with the black arts. On the other hand, it has been suggested (Gorni 1990: ch. VII) that Dante refers a little too insistently to various divinatory and magical arts (astrology, chiromancy, physiognomy, geomancy, pyromancy, hydromancy and, of course, necromancy). He appears to have been somehow familiar with an underground and marginalized culture of which the Kabbalah was confusedly a part, at least in popular opinion.
Thus, the interpretation of the forma locutionis as a universal matrix of language, even without referring it directly back to the Modistae, becomes still more persuasive.
The only drawback is that, in the absence of concrete proof of these contacts, this is all merely conjecture—as Busi (2004) pointed out in his review of Debenedetti Stow’s (2004) book on Dante and Jewish mysticism, for whom the hypotheses we have just set forth are the object of passionate conviction, a conviction that results in her treating a number of hypotheses as if they were proofs.
Still, when all we have to work with are the texts, certain textual analogies, while they cannot be taken as irrefutable proofs, deserve nevertheless to be stressed, if for no other reason than to encourage further research.
We may close by imagining that, on his journey to Paradise—the one he took post mortem, not his literary journey—Dante actually met Abulafia. They may even be conversing amiably together at this very moment, smiling indulgently perhaps at the efforts we have been making to discover whether they had anything in common. And if at a certain point Adam too were to join in the conversation, it would be fascinating to discover what language the three of them were using to make themselves understood. But since the present author is somewhat skeptical concerning the existence of a Perfect Original Language, he prefers to think that the Angels will no doubt provide state-of-the-art simultaneous translation.
A reworking of “Forma locutionis” published in Vattimo (1992), which also appeared in English, with the title “The Perfect Language of Dante,” in Eco (1995) and, in a somewhat different form, as “Languages in Paradise,” in
