Dante must then ask in what idiom Adam spoke. He criticized those (the Florentines in particular) who believed their native language to be the best. There are a great many native languages, Dante commented, and many of these are better than the Italian vernaculars. He then affirmed that, along with the first soul, God created a certam formam locutionis (I, vi, 4).
This expression has produced hundreds of pages attempting to establish what that forma locutionis was. According to certain interpreters it meant “a given form of language,” but such a translation would not explain why Dante, shortly thereafter, states that “it was therefore the Hebrew language [ydioma] that the lips of the first speaker forged [fabricarunt]” (I, vi, 7).
It is true that Dante specifies that he is speaking here of a form “in regard to the expressions that indicate things, as well as to the construction of these expressions and their grammatical endings,” allowing the inference that, by forma locutionis, he wished to refer to a lexicon and a morphology and consequently to a given language. Nevertheless, translating forma locutionis as “language” would render the next passage difficult to understand:
Qua quidem forma omnis lingua loquentium uteretur, nisi culpa presumptionis humanae dissipata fuisset, ut inferius ostenderentur. Hac forma locutionis locutus est Adam: hac forma locutionis locuti sunt homines posteri ejus usque ad edificationem turris Babel, quae “turris confusionis” interpretatur: hanc formam locutionis hereditati sunt filii Heber, qui ab eo sunt dicti Hebrei. Hiis solis post confusionem remansit, ut Redemptor noster, qui ex illis oritus erat secundum humanitatem, non lingua confusionis sed gratie frueretur. Fuit ergo hebraicum ydioma illud quod primi locuentis labia fabricarunt. (I, vi, 45–61).
On one side, if Dante wishes to use forma locutionis here to refer to a given tongue, why, in observing that Jesus spoke Hebrew, does he once use lingua and once ydioma (and in recounting the story if the confusion—I, vi, 6—the term loquela) while forma locutionis is only used apropos of the divine gift? On the other side, if we understand forma locutionis as a faculty of language innate in all humans, it is difficult to explain why the sinners of Babel are said to have lost it, since De Vulgari Eloquentia repeatedly acknowledges the existence of languages born after Babel. In the light of this, let us try to give a translation of the passage:
And it is precisely this form that all speakers would make use of in their language had it not been dismembered through the fault of human presumption, as I shall demonstrate below. By this linguistic form Adam spoke: by this linguistic form spoke all his descendants until the construction of the tower of Babel—which is interpreted as the “tower of confusion”: this was the linguistic form that the sons of Eber, called Hebrews after him, inherited. It remained to them alone after the confusion, so that our Savior, who because of the human side of his nature had to be born of them, could use a language not of confusion but of grace. It was thus the Hebrew tongue that was constructed by the first being endowed with speech. (italics mine)
In this way, the forma locutionis was neither the Hebrew language nor the general faculty of language but a particular gift from God to Adam that was lost after Babel. It is the lost gift that Dante sought to recover through his theory of an illustrious vernacular.
One solution to the problem has been proposed by Maria Corti:2 It is, by now, generally accepted that we cannot regard Dante as simply an orthodox follower of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. According to circumstances, Dante used a variety of philosophical and theological sources; it is furthermore well established that he was influenced by various strands of that so-called radical Aristotelianism whose major representative was Siger of Brabant. Another important figure in radical Aristotelianism was Boethius of Dacia, who, like Siger, suffered the condemnation of the bishop of Paris in 1277. Boethius was a member of a group of grammarians called Modistae and the author of a treatise, De modis significandi, that—according to Corti—influenced Dante.
The Modist grammarians asserted the existence of linguistic universals, that is, of rules underlying the formation of any natural language. This may help clarify precisely what Dante meant by forma locutionis. In his De modis, Boethius of Dacia observed that it was possible to extract from all existing languages the rules of a universal grammar, distinct from either Greek or Latin grammar (Quaestio VI). The speculative grammar of the Modistae asserted a relation of specular correspondence among language, thought, and the nature of things. For them, it was a given that the modi intelligendi and consequently the modi significandi reflected the modi essendi of things themselves.
What God gave Adam, therefore, was neither the simple faculty of language nor yet a natural language; it was, in fact, a set of principles for a universal grammar. These principles acted as the formal cause of language.
Maria Corti’s thesis has been vehemently contested by other scholars on the grounds that (1) there is no clear proof that Dante even knew the work of Boethius of Dacia and that (2) many of the linguistic notions that one finds in Dante were already circulating in the works of philosophers even before the thirteenth century (for instance, the idea that grammar has one and the same substance in all languages, even if there are variations on the surface, was already present in Roger Bacon). Yet this, if anything, constitutes proof that it was possible that Dante could have been thinking about universal grammar, and it is immaterial by whom he was directly inspired. (One can say that the forma locutionis given by God is a sort of innate mechanism, in the same terms as Chomsky’s generative grammar. And not because Dante was Chomskian, but because Chomsky, who is assumed to have been inspired by the rationalist ideals of Descartes and sixteenth-century grammarians, did not note that his inspirers were in some way themselves inspired by the ideas of the medieval Modistae.)
It thus seems most likely that Dante believed that, at Babel, there had disappeared the perfect forma locutionis whose principles permitted the creation of languages capable of reflecting the true essence of things, languages, in other words, in which the modi essendi of things were identical with the modi significandi The Hebrew of Eden was the perfect and unrepeatable example of such a language.
What was left after Babel? All that remained were shattered, imperfect formae locutionis, imperfect as the various vulgar Italian dialects whose defects and whose incapacity to express grand and profound thoughts Dante pitilessly analyzed.
Now we can begin to understand the nature of the illustrious vernacular that Dante hunts like a perfumed panther (I, xvi, I). We catch glimpses of it, evanescent, in the works of the poets that Dante considers the most important, but the language still remains unformed and unregulated, its grammatical principles unarticulated. Confronted with the existing vernaculars, natural but not universal languages, and a grammar that was universal but artificial, Dante sought to establish his dream of the restoration of the natural and universal forma locutionis of Eden.
Yet unlike those in the Renaissance who wished to restore the Hebrew language itself to its original magic and divinatory power, Dante’s goal was to reinstate these original conditions in a modern invention: an illustrious vernacular, of which his own poetry would constitute the most notable achievement, was, to Dante, the only way in which a modern poet might heal the wound of Babel.
The entire second part of De Vulgari Eloquentia is therefore not to be understood as a mere treatise of style but as an effort to fix the conditions, rules, forma locutionis of the only conceivable perfect language: the Italian of the poetry of Dante. The illustrious vernacular would take from the perfect language its necessity (as opposed to conventionality) because, just as the perfect forma locutionis permitted Adam to speak with God, so Dante’s language would permit the poet to make his words adequate to express what he wished and what could not be expressed otherwise.
Notice that from this bold conception for the restoration of a perfect language, and of his own role within it, comes a celebration of the quasi-biological force displayed by language’s capacity to change and renew itself over time rather than a lament over the multiplicity of tongues. For someone of Dante’s temperament, a conviction that the Hebrew of Adam was the one truly perfect language could only have resulted in his learning Hebrew and composing his poem in that idiom. That Dante did not decide to learn Hebrew shows that he was convinced that the vernacular he intended to invent would correspond to the principles of the universal, God-given form better even than the Hebrew spoken by Adam himself. Thus Dante puts forth his own candidacy as a new (and more perfect) Adam.
Once having improved his own personal perfect language, Dante could dare not only to descend into the infernal funnel and to climb up the mountain of Purgatory: he had the linguistical, poetical, and mystical force to fly to Paradise.
One could say that, since it was thinkable that in Paradise he could meet Adam, Dante went there (among many other reasons) to check with the hero of his little linguistic treatise the validity of his former assumptions.
Alas! Something strange happens. What Adam tells Dante about the language of Eden is exactly the contrary of what Dante conjectured in De Vulgari Eloquentia!
I repeat that Dante wrote De Vulgari Eloquentia between 1303 and 1305. The Inferno was made public in 1314, the Purgatory
