The Bible

The tradition of the Bible undoubtedly had a powerful impact on Dante’s poetic and intellectual development, both through actual reading of the Holy Scriptures and through the many forms of biblical commentary that accompanied the single books of the Bible in medieval times. His output through the years shows an increasing intensification of biblical references, allusions and citations. The Bible is almost totally absent in the Rime, and barely present, or at least not explicitly so, in the Vita Nuova, but appears with a certain frequency from the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia onwards, whereas in the Monarchia, Commedia, political letters and the letter to Cangrande della Scala, the biblical references are constant and often explicit. Reading the Holy Scriptures – for which Dante appears to use the Biblia parisiensis version of the Vulgate – left numerous traces throughout Dante’s entire body of work. Besides direct citations, the most obvious references are those relating to biblical writers, considered by Dante to be actual auctores, such as Giovanni, aguglia di Cristo (Par., XXVI 53: “Christ’s Eagle”), or Luke, described as scriba mansuetudinis Christi (Monarchia, I 16 2: “describer of Christ’s gentleness”). Dante’s reflection on the many meanings of the Scriptures, a point first mentioned in the Convivio and also, under a slightly different perspective, in the letter to Cangrande, is a result of his knowledge of the Biblical texts. The same goes for his many allusions to episodes and people from the Old and New Testaments, in both the Commedia and De vulgari eloquentia, where the discussion on the birth of language develops into a lengthy digression that includes the stories of Adam and Eva and the Tower of Babel. Similarly, the theological issues that Dante raises with his guides in the Commedia, such as the disquisition on the hierarchy of the angelic orders in Par., XXVIII 97-139, clearly draws inspiration from the Bible.