In any case between De Vulgari Eloquentia and the Canto XXVI there is a lapse of more than ten years, and in this period either Dante really met Adam in Paradise, learning from him something he did not previously know, or changed his mind for other reasons.
Please remember that in his earlier work Dante unambiguously stated that it was from the forma locutionis, given by God, that the perfect language of Hebrew was born and that it was in this perfect language that Adam addressed God, calling him El. In Paradise XXVI, 24–138, however, Adam says:
La lingua ch’io parlai fu tutta spenta
innanzi che all’ovra incomsummabile
fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta:
ché nullo effetto mai razionabile,
per lo piacer 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.
Pria ch’i’ scendessi all’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 dei mortali è come fronda
in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.
A literal translation would be:
The language that I spoke was entirely extinguished before the uncompletable work (the tower of Babel) of the people of Nembrot was even conceived. For no product of the human reason, from the human taste for always having something new, following the influence of the stars, is ever stable. It is natural that man speaks, but, whether this way or that, nature lets you do yourselves, as it pleases you. Before I descended into the pains of Hell, on earth the Highest Good was called I, from whence comes the light of joy that enfolds me. The name then became EL, and this change was proper, because the customs of mortals are like leaves on a branch, one goes and another comes.
This means that the Hebrew spoken before the building of the tower, when God was named El, was not the same as the Hebrew spoken in the earthly paradise, when Adam called Him I.
We are facing here a double problem: (1) Why did Dante change his mind? (2) Why did Dante choose the name I?
Let me deal first with the second question. Most of the interpreters say that the reasons for this choice are obscure. A first and absolutely ridiculous interpretation goes: I is the Roman numeral signifying the number one, the number of perfect unity. Ridiculous, because in Canto XIX, 128 of Paradise the Roman numeral for “I” stands for the smallest quantity, as opposed to M, which stands for one thousand, that is, for a great quantity. It would be curious to characterize God in terms of minimum value.
A second interpretation represents an odd case of confusion of tongues or the naive belief that one’s own tongue is the only existing and perfect one. Take Dorothy Sayers’s translation of the Divine Comedy, in which the last thirteen Cantos of the Paradise were translated by Barbara Reynolds, who also supplied the corresponding footnotes. (By the way, Dorothy Sayers died leaving thirteen Cantos untranslated, just as Dante was supposed not to have written or finished the same number.) The English translation reads:
Ere I descend 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;
The translation is not so whimsical, also because in English I would have been interpreted as a pronoun. A whimsical remark appears however in the footnote, where Reynolds suggests that Dante was thinking of Psalm 68, line 4, which says “Sing unto God, sing praises to his name: extol him that rideth upon the heavens by his name Jah, and rejoice before him.” Reynolds did not consider that unfortunately Dante not only could not read Hebrew but also could not have had the King James version on his desk. He knew only the Vulgata, and the Vulgata (where this psalm is numbered 67 rather than 68) translates the Hebrew as “Cantate Deo psalmum, dicite nomen ejus, iter facite ei qui ascendit super occasum. Deus est nomen illi. Exultate in conspectu ejus.” Thus the only name of God is Deus (Luther, too, translated Yah as Herr, the Lord). In the same vein, one must drop the hypothesis that Dante found the name IH in Exodus 3:15, because there, too, the Vulgata speaks of Deus.
Equally weak seems to be the explanation according to which Dante intended by I the personal pronoun io in a shortened form accepted by Florentine vernacular. It is true that he knew that God said “Ego sum qui sum,” but the name of God in this case would not be Ego (“I”) but rather Ehiè (“the One Who is”).3
There is a somewhat better explanation: Isidore of Seville in book VII, 15, of his Etymologies lists the traditional names of God according to the Hebrew tradition, and along with El, Eloi, Eloe, Sabaoth, Elion, Eie, Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Saddai, he also mentions Ia, because these are the last letters of alleluia. But if Dante, who certainly found El in Isidore, decided to shift to another name, why did he write I instead of Ia? Notice that if he used Ia instead of I the number of syllables in the verse would not have changed, and so the solution was poetically feasible.
I think we cannot answer all these questions without first solving the previous problem, namely, why Dante changed his mind about the perfection of the original Hebrew of Adam.
In order to answer we have to step back and see what happened in the cabalistic milieu before the birth of Dante as well as during his life.
By the time of the confusion of Babel the language of Adam was, as Dante puts it, “tutta spenta” (entirely extinguished). This view of the historical evolution of the original Adamic language was not Dante’s invention. For example, I find in Moshe Idel’s Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia a surprising quotation from an unpublished manuscript by an anonymous disciple of Abulafia, where it is said that:
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 and Eve and their children. The second is derived from the first, and the first was known only to Adam and was not passed on to any of his offspring except for Seth…. And so, the tradition reached Noah. And the confusion of tongues during the generation of the dispersion occurred only to the second type of language, i.e., to the natural language.4
The lost language of Adam, which escaped the confusion of tongues, was certainly the cabalistic combinatorial ability to produce or reproduce the perfect discourse of the Eternal Torah by rereading in a unheard-of way the text written in the language of the historical Torah. As such it was a forma locutionis, a universal set of mystical rules.
For Abulafia, the Torah had to be equated with the Active Intellect, and the scheme from which God created the world was the same as the gift that He gave to Adam: a linguistic matrix, not yet Hebrew but capable of generating all other languages. There were Averroist influences on Abulafia that led him to believe in a single Active Intellect common to the entire human species. There were demonstrable and undoubted Averroist sympathies in Dante, too, especially in his version of the Avicennist concept of the Active Intellect (equated with Divine Wisdom) that offers the forms to possible intellect. Nor were the Modistae and the others who supported the idea of universal grammar exempt from Averroist influence. Thus there existed a common philosophical ground that, even without positing direct links, would have inclined both Dante and Abulafia to regard the gift of language as the bestowal of a forma locutionis, defined as a generative linguistic matrix with affinities to the Active Intellect.
Abulafia made a distinction between the twenty-two letters as a linguistic matrix and Hebrew as the mother tongue of mankind. The twenty-two Hebrew letters represented the ideal sounds that had presided over the creation of the seventy existing languages. The fact that other languages had more vowels depended on variations in pronouncing the twenty-two letters. The twenty-two Hebrew letters represented the entire gamut of sounds naturally produced by the human vocal organs. It was the different ways of combining these letters that had given rise to the different languages, some of them with more vowels.
Abulafia admitted that the representation of these sounds according to certain graphic signs was a matter of convention; it was, however, a convention established between God and the prophets. Being aware that there existed other theories claiming that the sounds that expressed ideas of things were conventional (he could have encountered such an Aristotelian and Stoic notion in Jewish authors such as Maimonides), Abulafia, nevertheless, invoked a rather modern distinction between conventionality and arbitrariness, asserting that Hebrew was a conventional but not an arbitrary language.
He rejected the claim, sustained by,
