I am very grateful to President Walsh for the invitation to give the Distinguished Faculty Lecture this year. It is a special honor to be speaking here on this festive day when trustees, parents, family and friends are with us. I’d like to warmly welcome and express my gratitude to all of you whose support is so important to our students and to our community. And it is also the day we are celebrating the official opening of the Lulu Chow Wang campus center, a community resource that we have long awaited and which we are delighted to be enjoying at last.

These faculty lectures used to be given as part of first year orientation before classes had begun and when everyone was a bit distracted by the newness of things. But now that several weeks have passed and we are all into our courses, it feels right to me to be addressing some of the big questions about what a liberal education can mean. I am thinking of this occasion as a time out, a time out for reflection on our common enterprise. Preparing this talk has also given me an opportunity to think back on my own education and the parts of it that seem most resonant and valuable.

As I was thinking about what I would say today I came upon a wonderful
commencement address to the graduating English majors at Berkeley that focused my mind. It is entitled “What are you going to do with that?” and was written by Mark Danner, a New Yorker staff writer and professor of journalism who has written brilliantly about the implications of Abu Ghraib and other timely topics. Danner ruefully says, and I think rightly, that it is not easy to be an English major these days, or for that matter, a student of any of the humanities. Professors in the field know all too well what he is talking about. Articles and studies on the crisis of the humanities can be found in all sorts of journals and reports. Even in a liberal arts college like Wellesley, English has given way to economics as the most popular major. Students are pressured early on to decide how they will earn their living and what steps they need to take to do so. Since so much in our culture insists on the importance of material and professional success, and so many images of that success advertise its equivalence to happiness, we need to think against the grain to propose other models. Then there are the other fully legitimate pulls that our students feel towards the kind of training that will allow them to play effective roles in the world, to work in NGOs and development agencies, to be doctors, lawyers, and others who “make a difference.” What to study and why are real questions in this time of competing agendas.

We are hardly alone in these concerns: the topic of the purposes of education has been a central one in human thought for millennia. Both Plato and Aristotle had much to say on the subject, and it is a perennial topic of inquiry and reflection. We may say, as Aristotle and others have done, that the disinterested search for truth and virtue is itself the highest value; ideally the great freedom offered by a liberal education is the freedom to be thoughtful, to be intellectually curious and adventurous, to develop habits of mind that will be valuable both to any further career aspirations and to life itself. But we inevitably find ourselves drawn to ponder the practical uses of education as well. I recently read a vivid posing of the question in a lecture by Wellesley alumna and ABC correspondent Lynn Sherr who gave her talk a title very similar to Danner’s: “Why in Heaven’s Name are you Majoring in Greek?” Studying the Classics, like being an English major, or studying any of the humanities seems to necessitate both reflection and justification. Writers, too, often feel the need to speak to what Italo Calvino called “The Uses of Literature.” The study of literature intersects with so many other arenas—politics, theology, history, aesthetics, and philosophy—to name only some—that we are always in search of a way of defining what it is really about.

Since literature is my own field, I will be speaking about my experience both as a student and a teacher. My own college experience had a large dose of serendipity. The things that I thought I would be studying turned out not to be the things that I ended up studying. I went from being a pre-med student to being an English major, largely on the basis of a course on the American novel that taught me what it could mean to read literature as literature. I was thrilled to discover that a novel as timely and political as Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men ended on an allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem that I had read earlier in the year in a survey course. This little epiphany opened my eyes to the way that literary texts build on and incorporate other texts, becoming in the process commentary on those prior texts and weaving them into an ongoing tradition. I became fascinated by how such reflections also had a way of modifying the previous texts, allowing us to read them in new ways. As T.S. Eliot said in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” an essay that was canonic in the early sixties, “What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.” Much of my scholarship and teaching in subsequent years has had to do with this issue and I shall return to it later in this talk.

As a senior I was in search of a fifth course and kind of fell into one on Dante in translation. The passion of my teacher and of the poem itself spoke to something deep in my soul, so much so that I, who had virtually never been out of New York State, got on a prop-jet and went off to Italy after my graduation to learn Italian. Like everyone who goes to a foreign country and learns an unknown language, I discovered a new world. In my first days in Rome I was overwhelmed by the palimpsest of the eternal city, its visible layering of the past, all its poignant reminders of what once had been. I walked as in a dream among various epochs: Classical antiquity, Christian Renaissance and Baroque, and stylish modernity. Years of high school Latin suddenly took on new meaning as I strolled in the Roman Forum or climbed the Palatine Hill.

The rest of that summer I spent in Florence where I fell in love with Italian art and began to learn Italian history from the stones of Florence among which I was quite wonderfully living. The past seemed fully present as I looked out of my tiny pensione bedroom and saw the top of the Palazzo Vecchio, or whenever I took note of the places in the city that I knew about from reading Dante’s poem written so many centuries earlier. Everything seemed to have a magical aura in that first trip to Italy. These days students are much more adventurous than I could have been, and they travel to far flung, exotic, and difficult places that I barely knew existed. But for me a summer in Florence was enough to change the whole direction of my life. It also brought me dear friendships with Italians which have continued since that time. And even later it brought me colleagues with whom I have worked on many different projects as Dante studies gradually opened itself up to collaborative work.

I didn’t know that summer over forty years ago—and in fact it took many years before I did know—that one day I would end up teaching Dante and Italian literature as my life’s work. But I did know then that I had encountered a text that filled me with awe and wonder. Dante himself, in a book called the Convivio, speaks about such an experience: “Awe is the amazement caused in our minds when we see or hear or in any way experience impressive and astonishing things. Because these strike the person who experiences them as impressive, they induce us to reverence them; because they strike us as astonishing, they make us desire to acquire knowledge about them.” Awe, reverence, and the desire for knowledge. This is something that might happen in a lab or at a telescope or in any number of places, but for me it happened with a text written over seven hundred years ago. It was a text, moreover, that celebrated the desire for knowledge and equated love with learning. Dante’s Beatrice begins as an object of love and becomes a teacher as she guides Dante through Paradise, explaining the cause of moon spots or the nuances of Christian theology.

My experience was also an example of the power of elective affinities, something I have argued for ever since. In recent years the rise of identity politics has offered another model, one which builds on a student’s prior connections to her ethnic background. My own background contained nothing that would have led me into the world that I discovered through Dante, and yet it was somehow a true affinity, an inner correspondence. We don’t know what we will find when we open ourselves up to otherness of various kinds, and one of the things a good education does is provide many such opportunities. We need to be taught, I think, to care about things that are new to us in order to allow them to flower into significance. Wendy Doniger, a great scholar of Sanskrit texts, and someone who incidentally went to the same suburban high school that I did, makes a lovely argument for the power of other people’s myths. “Foreign myths,” she says, “tell us things that no one else knows, strange truths that are truly strange, things that our own classics never dreamt of. But they also sneak past our guard the things that we will not listen to from our own classics. The foreignness of the foreign text simultaneously mutes and intensifies the shock of recognition by presenting our home truths from a different angle.”

In my own work the foreignness that intrigues me most is temporal rather than spatial. The past is a more foreign country than any geographical place I have visited. Studying medieval texts and images, I find their strangeness more demanding and more rewarding than any merely geographical cultural otherness. But the past is also uncannily present, living on in many of our assumptions and our debates. And as we move into the past, we find the need to keep pushing further back. The writers who have the most to say are writers who are in a conversation with their predecessors as well as their contemporaries. At the very beginning of Dante’s journey through Hell, he enters Limbo, a place that traditional Christian theology had reserved for unbaptized infants. Dante adds to Limbo a special space for virtuous non-Christians, among whom he meets five of his favorite pagan poets from Antiquity. These poets greet Dante and, as he says, “far more honor still they showed me, for they made me one of their company, so that I was sixth amid so much wisdom.” Dante imagines this scene in which he is embraced by the poets he admires and is briefly admitted into their circle at the very outset of his journey.

This episode suggests that literature itself is a place of encounter beyond time and space, beyond death itself. It is the first in a whole series of meetings between poets, conversations in the otherworld that point to the meaning of literature in this world. To take one example, Dante’s haunting encounter with his old teacher, the poet and rhetorician Brunetto Latini, is so powerful that it became the model of a whole series of such meetings in 20th century literature: in T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, in Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, in poems by Dereck Walcott and Charles Wright among others. Each of these poets imagines a visionary encounter with a significant person from his past who helps define his poetic vocation. Poets invoke their poetic ancestors in imagined dialogues that are challenging and finally empowering.

The greatest such encounter in Dante’s poem is, of course, the one with Virgil. When Dante made Virgil his guide in the Divine Comedy, he gave voice to the dead poet and brought him back to life. Dante’s resurrection of Virgil is one of the most powerful acts of the sympathetic imagination in literary history-- and one of the most daring. How could Dante make a pagan poet his guide to a Christian afterlife? What did Dante see in Virgil?

What Dante knew of Virgil was his poetry, above all Virgil’s Roman epic, the Aeneid. The Aeneid is, among other things, a foundation myth, a mythical pre-history of the Augustan Rome in which Virgil was writing. It is the story of Aeneas, a survivor of the Trojan war, a refugee who is given as his destiny the obligation to seek out a new land, to transfer his household Gods from Troy to the Italian peninsula and found the civilization that will become Rome. Early on, in Book I, Jupiter promises that the Romans will have “Empire without end.” But the travails of the hero are the focus of the narrative in the first half of the poem, as Aeneas and his men wander about the Mediterranean, in search of the promised land that they don’t find until midway through the poem. Landing at last on the shores of Italy, and at the very center of the poem, Aeneas travels into the underworld to find the shade of his beloved father Anchises who had died on their voyage from Troy to Italy.

Anchises attempts to strengthen Aeneas for the coming trials by giving him a vision of Rome’s glorious future. At the high point of this vision, he compares the virtues of the Romans-to-be in effect, the Romans who were Virgil’s contemporaries-- with those of other peoples, articulating the meaning of Roman power: Others may have artistic, rhetorical or scientific expertise, but Romans are to be rulers, rulers with benevolence: “Other peoples will, I do not doubt/ still cast their bronze to breathe with softer features,/Or draw out of the marble living lines, plead causes better, trace the ways of heaven/with wands and tell the rising constellations;/ but yours will be the rulership of nations, remember, Romans, these will be your arts:/ to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,/to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.”

Since the Aeneid was read for centuries as the poem of empire, this speech was central for its readers, an encapsulation of an ideal of peace and justice that an empire could articulate without asking too many questions about the meaning of force and violence in the role of conquest and domination. We know that in its own time Virgil’s poem was read as a perfect embodiment of Augustan imperial ideology, that it bolstered Roman self-confidence to the degree that, as Tacitus reports, “ the people, when they heard his verses in the theater, all rose and cheered the poet, who happened to be present, as if he were Augustus himself.”

One of the things about great books, however, is that they are open to continuous reinterpretation. They are prophetic in ways that their authors may neither know nor imagine. Dante seems to have found in Virgil a figure of the limits of classical culture, its ultimate pathos and lack of hope. But he also found a way to make Virgil a preparation for Christian revelation. This becomes clear in Dante’s invention of the idea that a Silver Age Latin poet, Statius, was converted to Christianity by reading Virgil. In one of the most moving encounters in the Comedy Statius is made to express his deep love for Virgil and his gratitude to him for leading him to a salvation which Virgil himself can not attain. Most readers have seen this tribute as one that comes from Dante himself.

Christians were able to grant prophetic status to classical texts by appropriating them, as Dante did when he, like others, saw in Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue a sybilline prophecy of the coming of Christ, or when he claimed almost scriptural authority for the Aeneid’s promise that the Romans would have empire without end. Perhaps because there was no Emperor in his own historical time, Dante believed in the necessity of one even more than Virgil did. Although Dante understood the tragic dimension of the Aeneid, the ways in which death and the horrors of history undercut the poem’s Roman triumphalism, he remained committed nonetheless to its imperial ideology and to the providential nature of its empire.

The Aeneid proved to be open to another, antithetical reading that came to light only in our own time. It was during the Vietnam war that a second reading grew up alongside the first, a reading that took greater note of the poem’s darker side. Gradually we became alert to the poem’s undersong, all the ways that it revealed the costs of imperial power: the sacrifice of personal affection, the deaths of the young, the inevitability of violence. The end of the poem, with its hero refusing to spare his defeated rival Turnus, became the subject of much discussion about the way Aeneas himself was unable to follow his father’s guidance, unable to spare the vanquished. This darker and more complex reading is sometimes contested now, but it seems impossible to ignore. Ralph Johnson, one of the best readers of the Aeneid, speaks of the poem’s “severe dialectic,” its counterpoint of defeat and triumph, abjection and salvation, death and rebirth.

The Roman Republic was a model for our American founding fathers and the Roman Empire a model for many subsequent world powers. Virgil was writing in the moment of transition from republic to empire, and writing after a long and bitter civil war had finally come to an end in the power of his patron Augustus. The poem celebrates Augustus Caesar, born of the Gods, who will establish a Golden Age and imagines Augustus in triumph after the battle of Actium, receiving homage from all his conquests. The great celebration of Roman power and virtue enunciated by Aeneas’s father is an idealized version of Rome’s historical destiny, but it also becomes a way of questioning the hero himself who turns out to be unable, in the poem’s disturbing closing episode, to spare the victim who is begging him for mercy. The paradoxes of power, even power that one plans to use benevolently, are laid bare in a deep reading of the Aeneid. It is the kind of reading, in my view, that we need to be doing with newspapers and the media as well as with a classical text. Particularly in America now that we are, as the Romans once were, the only reigning superpower.

And it was in the newspaper, in the Boston Globe, that I found James Carroll’s thoughts on visiting Rome this month. Carroll writes of Rome, with its visible reminders of its past, as a place of polarities: between republic and empire, beauty and decay, order and tyranny, expression and silence—these, he says, are the tensions which found balance in ancient Rome and uphold still the pillar of culture. Looking at the history of empire told from the point of view of those who suffer it as well as those who build it, Carroll says “it is impossible any longer to imagine that imperial ambition is simply benign, which is why, perhaps, Americans should visit the city.” Visiting the Aeneid, as it is currently understood, would, I think, produce a similar perspective.

It is our obligation to take note of the gap between what we say we are doing and what we are actually doing, whether it is abroad in Iraq or at home in Louisiana, a point which takes me back to the Mark Danner article with which I began. Danner says that learning how to read is learning how to question and how to doubt, learning to see the gulf between what you are told about the world and what you can’t help but understand if your eyes are open. This seems to me particularly important in our historical moment. In any number of spheres there is an attack on facts, a substitution of ideology and rhetoric for reality. Perhaps some version of this obfuscation is always going on, but it feels particularly acute now, something that all of us, students and teachers, need to address and articulate.

If literature deepens and sharpens our understanding of historical complexity, it can also offers us a way to inform our individual moral sensibilities by allowing us to imagine the Other, and thereby free us from the inevitable limits of our own perspective. The critic Mary Pratt speaks of educating the imagination so that people, ourselves included, develop the capacity to stretch, to multiply themselves, to become, if only provisionally, radically other to themselves. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz describes how reading German post-war fiction gave him a way to move beyond the hatred of all things German that dominated his upbringing. He says that reading such writers and poets made him imagine himself in their place; they seduced me, he says, to imagine myself in their stead, back in the dark years, and just before the dark years, and just after. “I believe,” writes Oz, “that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred.” Here I agree with him completely. In fact, this seems to me the source of the arguable ethical dimension of literature and other works of the imagination. Literature provides ways of thinking about experience that experience itself does not always afford. For this reason, it can and does nourish our capacity for empathy and understanding.

In addition to enriching and complicating our sense of reality, great works of the imagination can also enlighten and inspire us. There is a pedagogy of the imagination, to borrow a phrase from Italo Calvino, that can offer us images towards which we can aspire. The imagination, says Calvino, is a repertory of what is potential, what is hypothetical, what might
exist. We need such nourishment and challenges to our habitual ways of seeing. Studying Dante has given me access to images that provide such nourishment by taking me to the visual art of his time, to artists such as Giotto and Ambrogio Lorenzetti who were his contemporaries or near contemporaries. The connections between Dante’s imagination and those of his artistic peers reciprocally illuminate aspects of his world and of theirs. For many years I was fascinated by the way that Dante’s Inferno utilized some of the same detailed images of punishment that are in the Last Judgment frescoes of his time. It is much easier to understand the theme of cannibalism in the final cantos of the Inferno if you see how frequently images of eating and being eaten appear in the depictions of Hell in such frescoes. Dante served as an influence on many artists who came after him and incorporated aspects of his vision of Hell in their paintings. Later, remembering that Dante wrote much of the Paradiso while living in Ravenna, I looked for and found analogies between episodes in the Paradiso and the iconography of the mosaics of its Byzantine churches. Recently I have been working on the connections between an episode in the Paradiso and public paintings in medieval Siena that I want to share with you here.

In his journey through the planetary spheres Dante encounters the souls of the blessed as sparkling lights who appear in various constellations or emblems. In the sphere of Jupiter the souls come together to spell out a sentence from the Bible in a kind of divine sky writing. It is the first sentence of the apocryphal Book of Wisdom which was then believed to have been written by King Solomon. It reads: Diligite iustitiam, qui iudicatis terram (Love Justice you who rule the earth.) This is an appropriate citation, given that the sphere of Jupiter will be the setting for a presentation of a group of just rulers.

I was intrigued when I discovered that this same sentence was painted prominently in Simone Martini’s great Maestà in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. For the Sienese, the Madonna was the queen of their city. They had promised her this honor on the eve of the Battle of Montaperti, a battle which, against all odds, and as they believed, only with her help, they had won. Her presence in this public civic space reaffirms her queenly role and her guidance in the city’s civic deliberations. At the center of the painting the Christ child is holding a scroll on which is written, in Latin, Love Justice you who rule the earth.

Once I had seen the coincidence of this biblical injunction to wise and just rule in both Dante’s poem and Simone’s Maestà, I began to wonder where else I might find it. It turns out that this biblical phrase was a commonplace of humanistic treatises on republican government. The city-states of Tuscany in Dante’s time were experimenting with a form of republican governance that faced many threats—from powers such as foreign potentates, from the worldly Papacy, and above all from the constant specter of civil strife. Then as now the question was how to persuade citizens to put the common good above their individual desires for wealth and power.

The group of citizens who ruled Siena commissioned the artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti to give visual form to their idea of such an ideal state. In the Palazzo Pubblico, in the special room in which the ruling group of nine regularly met to determine city business, the artist was to paint a series of frescoes in which the alternatives of good government and its opposite—tyranny-- could be seen. I was surprised and pleased to discover that, in the allegorical panel of Good Government, the figure of Justice is represented under the words of the same citation from the Book of Wisdom that we found in the Simone Martini Maestà which is in an adjacent room. Justice appears again in the panel among the six virtues that surround the old man who represents the Commune of Siena. The other prominent figure in this panel is the beautiful figure of Peace who is one of the most prominent of the Virtues.

In addition to the two allegorical panels that show the essence of the opposing alternatives of good and bad government, Ambrogio also painted a vision of what the good city would look like if it were indeed ruled by justice and conducive to peace. These ravishing images show us a flourishing city in which all sorts of activities are conducted: there is building, buying and selling, a wedding procession, a bookshop with a reader, a tavern, a shoemaker, overall a sense of constructive and joyous energy free to engage and enhance the life of all citizens. Prominent in the foreground is a round dance, people moving in harmony as a symbol of social well being and joy. One of the most endearing images is that of a kind of schoolroom taking place in one of the city’s alcoves. A lecturer is speaking, and Ambrogio has captured the rapt look of attention on the part of one of his listeners. The adjacent countryside is also part of the vision; it is the site of an aristocratic hunting expedition, and also a place of agricultural activity and abundance that is intimately connected to the city’s activities.

What makes Ambrogio’s imagery special is that he dares to affirm the possibility of a perfected society, a Golden Age, not as a pre-urban pastoral, but as it might appear in the complexity of a contemporary city-state. And there are enough similarities between this ideal city and the real city of Siena for its citizens to make the connection. For Dante, however, such a city was only imaginable in a distant past. When Dante meets up with his great-great grandfather Cacciaguida in Paradise, Cacciaguida eulogizes the “good Old Florence” as “peaceful, sober and chaste”-- a reposeful, fair, and trustworthy community. But this ideal city, so lovingly recalled, had already disappeared into the factional strife and economic greed of Dante’s own time. Ambrogio’s ideal city, on the other hand, is filled with the details of reality in the here and now. It is neither displaced into the past nor projected on to a heavenly future. These images still move and inspire us as we try to create the conditions of peace and justice in which such fruitful and productive activity can flourish in the here and now.

Perhaps it is because I’ve spent so much time thinking about fictions of the afterlife that I have come to cherish the sense of the here and now. Of course, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “here and now” is our “long ago and far away.” But isn’t this just the point about studying the past, that it gives us a way of transcending our own temporal limits and gives us access to other ways of conceiving reality? Studying the humanities allows us to recover as well as discover knowledge, to amplify our own humanity. What constantly amazes me is how, no matter what scientific and technological progress is made, basic questions that have engaged people for centuries remain basic, unresolved, perennially problematic: how to construct a just society, how to escape from cycles of reciprocal violence, how to deal with loss and sorrow. These are questions that are addressed over the centuries by historians and philosophers, but also by writers and artists. Great books and works of art and music as well give us access not only to complexity and new perspectives, but also to joy and wonder. They give us a resonant vocabulary for feelings as well as thoughts, and we look to them to open our sympathies, focus our attention, and express our hopes. What I wish for all of you, students, parents, and friends, is a continuing connection to the imagination of peace, justice, and learning itself.