The Cross That Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy by Mary Alexander Watt (review)

Abstract

MARY ALEXANDER WATT, The Cross That Dante Bears: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and the Cruciform Church in the Divine Comedy. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Pp. xii, 225. ISBN: 0-8130-2876-0. In preliterate societies the cross often represented a conjunction of dualities. The horizontal arm was associated with the terrestrial, worldly, feminine, temporal, destructive, negative, passive, and death, while the vertical arm connoted the celestial, spiritual, masculine, eternal, creative, positive, active, and life. Often symbolic of the four astrological elements of earth, water, fire, and air, a cross was also perceived as the cosmic axis from which radiated the spatial dimensions of height, length, width, and breadth, as well as the directions of north, east, south, and west. The vertical pole and crossbar used to crucify Jesus Christ became the principal symbol of Christianity. In the introduction to her book, Watt reminds us that by the thirteenth century the potency and polysemous capacity of the cross was so prevalent as to inform the work of cartographers, architects, and artists alike. Its symbolic potential continued to expand well into the fourteenth century when it was all-pervasive. Maps of Christendom, the known world, and those of Jerusalem, the world in microcosm, were laid out, like church architecture with an eastward orientation, in a cruciform shape. Those maps and churches were united in a nexus of meaning that included pilgrimage. To move toward the altar or to travel to Jerusalem was to take up the cross in imitation of Christ's suffering. Itinerary, map, and church are, thus, typologically related, and each is a manifestation of the same significance, both literal and allegorical-the event of the crucifixion and the promise of spiritual redemption. Watt's book traces the cultural presence of the cross as it lends form and meaning to the medieval representation of the multi-dimensional universe, the journey, and the church in order to reveal how all three not only pervade the imagery of The Divine Comedy, but most importantly to her argument, structure the poem, serve to define it in terms of genre, and buttress its spiritual authority. The title of the book alludes to the pilgrim's journey as both the cross that Dante bears, the suffering that will redeem him, and the cross that he wields in his crusade against those who have defiled him. Both his pilgrimage and his crusade serve a pseudo-autobiographical purpose. In a strategy similar to the inclusion of references to the cruciform church and the road to Jerusalem, Dante includes a series of references that evoke the places of his own wandering. The journey of his actual life is presented, then, as typologically equivalent to progress in a cruciform church and to the journey to Jerusalem. As such, Dante's own life is revealed as the allegorical fulfillment of the figura that comprises the literal narrative...the poem and the journey, it describes, or rather foretells, are therefore are also cross-shaped...(5). Pilgrimage in the poem, as Watt explains, furnishes both a spiritual itinerary to guide the Christian wanderer and a travelogue of Dante's own purgatorial journey in exile away from the hell of Florentine political intrigue and the corruption of papal Rome to the reward of paradise, rehearsed and promised by his poem. The poet presents himself as an exemplum, a Christ figure, a new Paul, and his poem becomes the record of his wanderings, a guidebook to those seeking a new pilgrimage. …