VI DANTE AND ISLAM (As represented by “The Gospel of Barnabas”)

The aim of these Essays has been to present Dante in different aspects as the Apostle of Freedom: a man endowed with those profound convictions on which alone true tolerance can be built, a man whose deep and passionate earnestness is tempered and balanced by a saving sense of humour. The substantiation of this claim may perhaps justify us in carrying the reader into a remote by-way of Italian literature; in asking him to note points of contact and of contrast which emerge when the Poet is confronted, so to speak, with a document which we may be sure he never saw,[261] but which yet seems to bear, here and there, strange marks of the impress of his thoughts and of his phraseology. If the comparison of the two writers should seem at first sight gratuitous and far-fetched, it may yet succeed in throwing light on Dante’s genius and temper from an unfamiliar angle.

The Clarendon Press published in 1907 an Editio princeps of the Mohammedan Gospel of Barnabas from an unique MS. of the latter half of the sixteenth century in the Imperial Library at Vienna.[262] This document—apart from its theological and dogmatic importance—should prove to be of considerable interest to students of Italian literature, as well on account of its grammatical and orthographic peculiarities, as for the positive literary merits which not infrequently relieve a style in general somewhat rough and bald.

The task of preparing for the press a translation of this remarkable document could not fail to bring before one’s mind certain points of contact with Dante, more especially as the curious archaic Italian in which the “Gospel” is written lends itself, in a certain measure, to verbal coincidences and quasi-coincidences with passages in the Poet’s writings. The points of contact which will be adduced in the present paper are none the less interesting because the date of the original Gospel of Barnabas still remains to a certain extent an open question, and with it also the nature of the relations, direct or indirect, that may have subsisted between its compiler and the author of the Divina Commedia.[263]

But first a word is due about the character and scope of this very apocryphal Gospel. The MS., as we have already suggested, is of comparatively recent date. Paper, binding, and orthography all combine with the script to place it—not, as its eighteenth century critics supposed, in the fifteenth century, or earlier, but—in the latter half of the sixteenth century.[264] It is, however, of course possible that the Vienna Codex may be a copy of an earlier MS.; and, curiously enough, one of the strongest arguments for this earlier original arises, as we shall shortly see, out of an apparent reference to the famous Jubilee of 1300 A.D. which looms so large in Dante’s life and writings.

The book is a frankly Mohammedan Gospel, giving a full, but garbled, story of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, from a Moslem point of view. It claims to have been written by Saint Barnabas (who figures in it as one of the Twelve—to the exclusion of poor Saint Thomas!) at the injunction of his Master, for the express purpose of combating the errors taught by Saint Paul and others. These errors are summed up under three heads: (1) the doctrine that Jesus is Son of God, (2) the rejection of Circumcision, and (3) the permission to eat unclean meats. Of these three errors the first is regarded as of the greatest importance; and not only is the Gospel narrative contorted and expurgated to suit the writer’s purpose, but Christ Himself is made repeatedly to deny his own Divinity and even his Messiahship, and to predict the advent of Mohammed, the “Messenger of God.”

About two-thirds of the material is derived, without question, from our four Canonical Gospels, of which a decidedly unscientific “harmony” forms the framework of Barnabas’ narrative; the remaining third, which takes the form of discourses put into the mouth of Christ, is purely oriental in character, and largely an elaboration of germs or hints to be found in the Koran or in Jewish tradition. It is on this section of the book that the Dantist’s interest will be concentrated.

The brief words of awful solemnity in which the Gospels speak of the doom of the lost are supplemented in Barnabas by elaborate descriptions of infernal torments which, whencesoever ultimately derived, are expressed in terms which exhibit remarkable coincidences with the Inferno and Purgatorio of Dante. Mohammed’s two favourite themes were, the final Judgment and the horrors of Hell on the one hand, and, on the other, the delights of Paradise. And the second theme is treated in Barnabas almost as fully as the first. The Paradise of Barnabas has perhaps little in common with the Earthly Paradise of Dante, and still less with the Celestial; but it gives our author scope for an excursion into the realms of astronomy, whereby he finds himself (perhaps unconsciously), at the end of his journey, much nearer to Dante’s scheme of the Ten Heavens than to the normal tradition of the Jews and Arabs.

It will be convenient to deal first with this teaching on Paradise, secondly with the Inferno of Barnabas, and thirdly with certain verbal and other points of contact between Barnabas and Dante; concluding with some more general considerations regarding the tone and colouring of the “Gospel.”

It would be strange if the Paradise of Barnabas had not some features in common with Dante’s. Man’s dreams of an ideal resting-place, whether past or future, have a tendency to express themselves in terms of greensward and flowers and luscious fruits, cool streams and sunshine tempered by refreshing shade. The name “Paradise” itself means “park” or “plaisance” as we know, and though Barnabas is not conspicuously happy when he poses as an etymologist,[265] the connotation of the word was too securely established alike in Moslem and in Christian tradition to admit of much variation. Paradise, of course, has two different meanings in Dante, and the same is true of its use in Barnabas; but inasmuch as the distinction in the latter is not expressly marked, it will be convenient for our purpose to group together the conceptions of the Earthly and the Celestial Paradise. In Barnabas, as in Dante, the name is applied to the scene of man’s creation—

and of his temptation, fall and expulsion.[267] In both again it is used also of the eternal home of God, the good angels and redeemed mankind.[268] Speaking generally, the main features of the Paradise of Barnabas resemble more closely those of Dante’s Earthly Paradise; while its position in the scheme of the universe corresponds rather to that of the Celestial Paradise of Dante. Thus the four perfumed rivers[269] of this “Gospel,” though derived, almost certainly, from the Koran, correspond, in a sense, to the miraculously clear and limpid stream which arrested the poet’s progress[270]; while its profusion of flowers and fruits[271] recall the scene portrayed in Virgil’s parting words—

and—

which drew Dante’s wondering eyes across the stream to where Matelda tripped singing through the painted meadow—

Again, a somewhat terse definition of Paradise in Barnabas reminds one of a still shorter phrase of Dante’s. The author of the De Vulgari Eloquentia describes the home which man forfeited by his first sin as “delitiarum patria[275]” while for Barnabas, “Il parradisso he chassa doue DIO chonsserva le sui delitie[276]”; or, as he puts it further on “DIO ha chreato il parradisso per chassa delle sui delitie.”[277]

But the heavenly Paradise of the Empyrean is also described by Dante in material phrase as “God’s garden.” “Questo giardino”[278] is the name by which Saint Bernard designates the Mystic Rose, as he unveils its mysteries to Dante; and already in the Eighth Heaven Beatrice had essayed to divert the Poet’s gaze from her own loveliness—

Here we may note that in Barnabas[280] God (not Christ, of course) is the sun of Paradise, while Mohammed is its moon.

But there is another passage in the Paradiso, where Dante himself is speaking in answer to Saint John’s catechizing: a passage which may well detain us a little longer. Here Paradise is described in so many words as the “Garden of the Eternal Gardener”—

Is it fanciful to see a subtle resemblance—in thought, perhaps, more than in phrase (though Dante’s symbolic meaning is wanting)—in Barnabas’ description of Paradise as a place “doue ... ogni chossa he frutuossa, di fruti proportionati ha cholui che lo ha choltiuato?”[282]

There emerge, at any rate, from both passages, the thought of the Divine Gardener ... and of a proportion for which He is in some way responsible. But perhaps a more striking coincidence—if coincidence it be—is that between the answer given to a problem raised by Saint Bartholomew in Barnabas and the assurance vouchsafed by Piccarda[283] in resolution of Dante’s difficulty concerning degrees of glory in Heaven.

“O Master,” says Bartholomew,[284] “shall the glory of Paradise be equal for every man? If it be equal, it will not be just, and if it be unequal, the lesser will envy the greater.” Jesus answers: “Non sera equalle perche dio he iusto he ogniuno si chontentera perche hiuui non he inuidia,” and again, There shall be “tutta una gloria sebene sara ha chi più ha chi meno. Non portera alloro inuidia ueruna.” So, when Dante questions the beatified Piccarda, in her earth-shadowed sphere—

the spirit replies, in words which, though more beautiful and more profound, are inevitably called up by the passage of Barnabas just quoted—

Turning now to the geographical or rather astronomical aspect of the subject, we find in Barnabas a definite divergence from the doctrine of the Koran, and adoption of a Ptolemaic scheme closely resembling that of Dante’s Paradiso. There are nine heavens, not counting Paradise, i.e. ten heavens in all. “Noue sono li cielli li quali sono distanti luno dal altro chome he distante il primo cielo dala terra. Il quale he lontano dalla terra cinquecento hanni di strada.”[287] In the “five hundred years’ journey” there is a reminiscence of Jewish tradition: but the seven heavens of the Talmud and of the Koran have become ten. And though these heavens are not definitely stated to be arranged, like Dante’s, as a series of concentric spheres with earth as the centre, they form a graduated series, in which each is to the next as a “punto di ago,”[288] or as a grain of sand.[289] The planets, again, have their place in the scheme. They are not, apparently, identified with the several “cieli,” as in Dante’s arrangement, but are “set between” or “amongst” them: “li cielli fra li qualli stano li pianeti.”[290]

The point of resemblance is to be found in a graduated series of ten (and not seven) heavens, characterised by an ascending scale of magnitude, and culminating in the Paradise of the Blessed.

The resemblances are indeed striking; but though ‘Barnabas is vastly superior to previous Moslem writers in the richness of his conception of Heaven,’ (they in common with their Christian contemporaries shewing much more spontaneity and exuberance of fancy in describing the torments of Hell), Dante excels markedly in the glowing wealth of his picture of Paradise—its radiance, its variety, its peace, its activity, its all-pervading love.[291]

So far, it may be said, the suggested points of contact between Barnabas and Dante have been somewhat vague and hypothetical. They may, perhaps, be adequately accounted for on the basis of a common tradition—the practically universal tradition of a Garden-Paradise, and the Aristotelo-Ptolemaic scheme of astronomy common to all the civilised West, whether Christian or Mohammedan, till the days of Copernicus and Galileo. But in the Inferno of Barnabas we may discover more definite and more convincing resemblances to features and passages of the Divina Commedia.

Islam, except in its later developments,[292] has no place for a Purgatory. There is no mention of a Purgatorio in the Koran or in this “Gospel,” though Barnabas gives even the Faithful a probationary residence of torment in Hell, varying from Mohammed’s own brief term of “the twinkling of an eye” to a duration of 70,000 years![293] But the Barnaban arrangement of Hell itself furnishes an almost exact parallel to the scheme of Dante’s Purgatorio. The framework of the arrangement is that of the seven capital sins. Hell is divided[294] into seven circles or “centri” wherein are punished respectively (1) lo irachondo, (2) il gollosso, (3) lo acidiosso, (4) il lusuriosso, (5) lo hauaro, (6) lo inuidiosso, (7) il superbo. The order of the sins differs considerably from that adopted by Dante, and indeed is not repeated in any of the typical arrangements given in Dr. Moore’s well-known Table;[295] coming nearest to that of Aquinas. In common, however, with Dante’s arrangement it has the juxtaposition of Pride and Envy and their position at the lower end of the series: a point which is perhaps the more significant in that Barnabas approaches his Inferno from the bottom (not, as one would have expected, from the top), beginning with “il più basso centro” of Pride. There is another point also, in which the Inferno of Barnabas resembles both the Inferno and the Purgatorio of Dante—the principle which runs through all its torments “per quae peccat quis ... per haec et torquetur.” The proud shall be “trampled under-foot of Satan and his devils,”[296] the envious shall be tormented with the delusion that even in that joyless realm “ogniuno prendi allegrezza del suo malle he si dolgia che lui non habia peggio”;[297] the slothful shall labour at tasks like that of Sisyphus,[298] and the gluttonous be tantalised with elusive dainties.[299] Nor can we fail to notice here how in the story of the serpent’s doom[300] there comes out the idea of all pollutions of human sin—especially repented sin—streaming back eventually to Satan: the conception which underlies the system of Dante’s rivers of Hell, including the “ruscelletto” that trickles down from Purgatory.[301]

There is a vivid description in Barnabas of the “Harrowing of Hell” at the coming of God’s Messenger, which though it has nothing in common with the account of the Saviour’s Descent as related by Virgil in Limbo, is strongly suggestive of a later scene where at the advent of the much-debated “Messo del ciel,”[302] who comes to open the gates of Dis, both banks of the Styx tremble, and more than a thousand “anime distrutte” fly headlong like frogs before a water-snake.[303] “Onde tremera,” says Barnabas, “lo infferno alla sua pressenzza[304] ... quando elgi ui andera tutti li diauoli stridendo cercherano di asscondersi sotto le ardente brasse dicendo luno allo altro: scampa scampa che elgi uiene machometo nosstro innimicho.”[305]

While the general atmosphere of Hell in Barnabas, with its “neui he giazi intollerabili,”[306] its torturing fiends, its biting serpents, its Sisyphus-labours and Tantalus-pains, its harpies, its burning filth and nameless horrors, has the same “reek” as that of Dante’s Inferno, there are passages which present an almost verbal parallel. In his description of the cries of the lost, Barnabas says: “malladirano ... il loro padre he madre he il loro chreatore.” Who can but recall Dante’s words about the dismal spirits assembled on the bank of Acheron, who—

This brings us to the subject of actual verbal coincidences, of which we must confess we have found but two, though a more systematic investigation might well yield a much larger number.

Barnabas’ recurring characterisation of the idols of the heathen as “dei falsi he bugiardi”[308] is surely too remarkable to be without significance, and is enforced and supported by the occurrence of another cadence of the same canto of the Inferno in the phrase “rabbiosa fame,” which in Barnabas, however, applies not to the symbolic lion of the Divina Commedia,[309] but to the torments of the Lost.

There remains one more point to be adduced—an incidental and a somewhat subtle one which makes, not so much for a relation between Dante’s writings and the Gospel of Barnabas as for a relation of contemporaneity between the two writers. The inference which it would suggest is so definite and precise, that it is only fair to remark that there are puzzlingly contradictory arguments to be drawn from the language and style of Barnabas.

Our point, then, is as follows. Barnabas puts into the mouth of our Lord, as we have observed above, numerous predictions of the future advent of Mohammed as “Messiah” and “Messenger of God.” In one of these a “Jubilee” is spoken of as recurring every hundred years: “il iubileo ... che hora uiene ogni cento hanni.”[310] The writer or compiler here, as often, fails to throw himself back into the Palestine of the first century, in which, as his very considerable knowledge of the Old Testament[311] should have reminded him, the Hebrew Jubilee of fifty years would have been in force. Whence, then, comes this Jubilee? He cannot have derived it from the Koran. We are almost forced to the conclusion that the “hora” of the passage quoted is a literal “now” and refers to a contemporary institution—to the Jubilee as conceived of at the moment when the lines were penned; and that, the Jubilee of Western Christendom. This carries us back beyond the twenty-five years’ Jubilee of modern times—beyond the year when Clement VI, for his own ends, instituted a Jubilee of fifty years after the Hebrew model; and would give us as our terminus ad quem the year 1349. For the upper limit—the terminus a quo of the original Barnabas we must turn to the famous Jubilee of 1300, the ideal date of Dante’s pilgrimage. For though the Bull[312] by which that Jubilee was promulgated alleged antecedent tradition, and the contemporary chroniclers naturally followed suit,[313] there seems to be no sufficient historical evidence for a precedent. Thus, between the years 1300 and 1350—and, apparently, only during that period—it would have been possible to speak of the centennial Jubilee as an established institution. If this be so, the writing of this passage in Barnabas is relegated to the years in which the Divina Commedia took its final shape, or those just after the poet’s death in 1321 when the poem so swiftly took its place among the classics of the world’s literature.

The foregoing sketch does not pretend to be exhaustive;[314] it does not even claim to have proved anything of a substantial nature: but it may perhaps suggest to some more competent mind a line of study which has at least the merit of freshness, and it may serve to introduce to those who are not acquainted with it, a document of no ordinary interest and of no little beauty.

It is sometimes stated that Dante places Mohammed not among pagans nor among heretics but with the schismatics: as though he shared the optimistic view of some of his contemporaries, that the Moslems were but an extreme form of Christian “sect.”

But Dante distributes his pagans without prejudice throughout the successive circles, from the “Nobile Castello” in Limbo[315] to the central seat of infamy in the Giudecca; and, as a matter of fact, a pagan, Curio, is partner of Mohammed’s doom in the penultimate “bolgia” of Malebolge. Obviously “scisma” must not be taken too technically from Mohammed’s lips, supplemented as it is by the more general phrase “seminator di scandalo.”[316] The “schism” of which the False Prophet is guilty is rather that introduction of discord and strife into the civilised world which makes “Macometto cieco” in the eighteenth canzone a personification of the factious spirit of Florence.

Yet if it had fallen to Dante’s lot to judge the Founder of Islam by the spirit of this Mohammedan Gospel, he might have shared that milder and more optimistic view of Mohammedanism which, according to a recent writer,[317] inspired Saint Francis when he set out upon his Egyptian mission. For here he would have found, side by side with the inevitable denial of our Lord’s Divinity, an attribution to him not only of the Gospel miracles, but of others beside. He would have found deep teachings on prayer and fasting and almsgiving; on humility, penitence[318] and self-discipline; on meditation and mystic love. He would have found an asceticism in some ways as extravagant as any to be discovered in mediaeval legend, yet tempered with saving humour and common sense; a tolerant and charitable spirit which rivals even that of the “Cristo d’ Italia,” and “a succession of noble and beautiful thoughts concerning love of God, union with God, and God as Himself the final reward of faithful service, which it would be difficult to match in any literature.”[319]

Eleven years after the above lines were written, there appeared in Madrid a study of Dante’s relations with Mohammedan Eschatology,[320] which may possibly prove to hold the key to some of the problems raised by the Gospel of Barnabas. The learned Spanish Professor of Arabic is by no means the first to explore the field of possible Oriental sources for the Divine Comedy. Since Ozanam wrote his La Philosophie Chrétienne avant Dante, a number of writers—D’Ancona, D’Ovidio and others in Italy, and Vossler in Germany—have busied themselves with this subject; and in 1901, M. Blochet[321] brought both the general idea of the Unearthly Pilgrimage and some of its details into what looks like a derivative relationship with the two great Oriental Ascension-myths: the very ancient Mazdean story of Arda-Viraf, of Persian origin, and the secondary legend of Mohammed’s one-night journey through the heavens, founded on a short and obscure passage in the Koran[322] and known as the Miradj. Together with other researchers in the same field, M. Blochet brings in also Sinbad the Sailor, the Voyage of St. Brendan, and all the family of the Quest of the Fortunate Isles; working up the pedigree right back to the Hesperides of the Hellenic myths—themselves descended from an ancestry more ancient still, and of origin further East. He suggests the many possible channels of transmission of oriental lore to Western Europe, and in particular to Ireland[323] by the more easterly “Amber Route” which archaeology shews to have passed from Mesopotamia over the Caucasus and through Russia to the Baltic. He points again to the openings made by the Crusades, and singles out the work of Dante’s Venetian contemporary, Marin Sanudo, Liber secretorum fidelium crucis,[324] as evincing such a mastery of the entire “Eastern Question” as would imply a very exact knowledge of the Moslem religion and its legends. He points also to Paget Toynbee’s demonstration of Dante’s indebtedness in no less than ten passages of the Vita Nuova and Convivio, to the Moslem astronomer Djaafer-îbn-Mohammed-el-Balkhi, known to the mediaeval West by the less cumbrous name of Alfraganus.[325]

New ground has, however, undoubtedly been opened up by Dr. Asín. In his Inaugural Lecture he makes claims which, no doubt, will be fiercely combated, and in the end largely discounted. Dr. Parodi in his important notice of this book[326] points out that Asín’s contention is two-fold, and one half of it, at least, unprovable. The Spanish Orientalist claims to have proved (1) that the Western legends of the World Beyond are derived from Arab (and ultimately from Persian) sources, (2) that Dante was acquainted with specific Moslem sources, and used them freely.

For the first of these contentions, which was, in substance Blochet’s,[327] he has brought—so Parodi admits—fresh and varied evidence; and this part of the claim may now be regarded as largely substantiated. The second claim: that Dante actually knew, and drew from, the Moslem legend “is” says the Italian reviewer, “and will remain, I fear, incapable of demonstration.”[328] Yet he admits that the parallels adduced between the Moslem Hell and Dante’s Inferno, and still more between the Miradj and the Paradiso, are such as to arouse perplexity and astonishment in a mind hostile to, or unconvinced by, the theory of the learned Spaniard. The parallels he interprets[329] as remarkable instances of the similar working of human imagination on similar topics, all over the world. Whether such a hypothesis meets all the facts may still be an open question. But there can be no question whatever that if Dante, who certainly owes the biggest debt to his “true precursor,” Virgil, be indebted also to the Miradj or other Mohammedan legend,[330] he has more than repaid his debt in the splendid originality with which he has bent and transformed such material to his own higher purposes: a use which implies masterly assimilation and adaption, and amounts to creative work.

Yet we would venture to plead for an open mind, even on the subject of Asín’s second contention, and venture to ask whether the Gospel of Barnabas does not contribute some little additional force to the Spanish professor’s argument? When all deductions have been made, has he not gone far towards proving that Dante was more definitely indebted to Moslem thought and legend than has been hitherto believed; and in particular that he may have drawn, directly or indirectly, from Mohammedan sources the architectonic idea of “Hell,” and other parts of his scheme of which the affinity with “Barnabas” has been noted in the preceding pages? If so, we may with some probability attribute to those same sources the occasional striking identity of phraseology which we have observed—regarding them as, in some sense, sources both for Dante and for “Barnabas”; though in some cases it is difficult to believe that the so-called “Barnabas” is not quoting Dante from memory.

The man who placed the Moslem Captain Saladin and the Moslem Philosophers Averroes and Avicenna in the same region of the other world as his own dear master Virgil[331]; who placed the condemned Averroist, Sigieri of Brabant, in the Fourth Heaven as companion of the recognised Doctors of the Church, and put an eulogy of him into the mouth of his opponent Thomas Aquinas,[332] would surely not be willing to borrow from Moslem sources ideas and materials for his mighty building—

That suitable material was in existence (though in the Arabic language) has been abundantly proved. From the various mediaeval forms of the Mohammedan legend of the Prophet’s visit to the other world, Professor Asín draws numerous and striking parallels to the Divina Commedia. The topography of Hell, with its most infamous of sinners in the lowest pit, the scheme of the Heavens, which, like Dante’s, follows the Ptolemaic system of concentric spheres, and many more detailed analogies. He finds the closest affinity in a writer of the same century, Ibn Arabi, a Spanish thinker, who died twenty-five years before Dante was born. By this Arabi the legend—which may have formed the basis of much of the eschatology of “Barnabas”—was presented together with a mystical and allegorical interpretation, such as Dante himself suggests for his own work in the Epistle to Can Grande.[334] Dante’s noble contemporary, Raymond Lull, seems to have known this book of Arabi’s in the original. Dante was not, like Raymond, an Arabic scholar, but he may well have become, by oral means, acquainted with something of its substance.

The court of Alfonso X of Seville, into which Dante’s Brunetto plunged in the abortive embassy of 1260, was a hive of Moslem learning and speculation. And though Brunetto’s visit was but short (and from this point Dr. Parodi does not fail to draw full capital), he was not the only Florentine who found his way to Seville.[335] Commercial relations between Tuscany and Seville were alive in Dante’s day; and the intercourse of trade brings with it a measure of intellectual commerce. The Papal Court to which the Poet paid his fatal visit as Florentine Ambassador must still have held fresh memories of St. Peter Pascual, who was conversant with the Mohammedan legends of Hell and Paradise; and in Ricoldo of Montecroce Dante had an illustrious fellow-townsman who was notably learned in Moslem lore,[336] though missionary travels kept the good Dominican away from Florence during the years of the Poet’s residence, and he only returned as Prior of Sta. Maria Novella in 1301, the year of Dante’s exile, and died the year before his death, in 1320.

Altogether, there seems good reason to believe that Mohammedan materials, if not actual Mohammedan sources, were accessible to Dante, and that with large-hearted tolerance he was content to use them, and so to give them an immortality which they could not otherwise have achieved.

Thus we may conjecture a definite relation between “Barnabas” and the Divine Comedy: not through a debt of either to other (unless it be of “Barnabas” to Dante), but through a measure of common ancestry.