Commentary Purg XXII 64-73

Statius's response surprises Virgil and continues to surprise nearly everyone.  It was Virgil whose example made him want to be a poet and Virgil who brought him to love the true God.  The culminating verse of his answer begins by restating the first part of the equation, to which no one can object, and then the second ('per te cristiano').  There is no external authority, competent or otherwise, who would have brought Dante to believe such a thing.

      However, if Dante believed, or had decided to believe, that Statius was a Christian, when did he think he first converted?  Virgil's own remark about his not finding any evidence in the text of the Thebaid that supports a Statian conversion to Christianity is perhaps a clue to what we should do in examining that text.  That is, the 'dating' of such a conversion might have seemed ascertainable from Statius's texts themselves.  Mariotti (Mari.1975.1) discussed Poliziano's view that a passage in the Thebaid (IV.514-518), naming the mysterious 'high lord of the triple world' (Demogorgon?) seemed to authorize understanding of a Christian intent on the part of its author.  Mariotti's argument did not convince Hollander (Holl.1980.2), pp. 206-7, who argued instead that a passage early on in the work (Theb. II.358-362) revealed, unmistakably, a reference to the key prophetic text in Virgil's fourth Eclogue.  (He might have argued that there is an even more precise reference at Theb. V.461, the phrase 'iam nova progenies' [and now a new race] that matches exactly Virgil's key phrase in the Eclogue [IV.7].)  Thus, if for Dante the phrase in Virgil that converted Statius to belief in Christ is that one, it only makes sense that, finding it in the text of Statius's epic, he could argue that, by the time he was writing its second (or at least its fifth) book, Statius was already a closet Christian.  For a discussion of the passage see Chiamenti (Chia.1995.1), pp. 205-8.  Dante's precision is careful: Statius, by the time he was writing his seventh book, in fact verse 424 of that book, had been baptized.  In [Purg XXII 88-89] he is made to say, 'I was baptized before, in my verses, / I had led the Greeks to the rivers of Thebes' (a text that Padoan [Pado.1970.1], p. 349, is drawn to, is puzzled by, and retreats from).  Further, it seems certain that Dante, as many another, thought of Domitian as a persecutor of Christians; since the epic begins with typically servile praise of the emperor by the poet, Dante might have surmised that he had begun writing the epic as a pagan, but got the light from reading (or remembering) Virgil's prophetic Eclogue before he had finished his second book.  Sometime between his first (and after his second?) citation of the prophecy and the seventh book he finally converted openly ([Purg XXII 88-91]).  Hollander (Holl.1980.2), p. 206n., also suggests the possible relevance of the 'secret Christianity' of the rhetor Victorinus described by St. Augustine in his Confessions (VIII.2) (Pine.1961.1), pp. 159-61; Olga Grlic (Grli.1995.1) argues for the wider pertinence of Augustine's own conversion to that of Statius.  And Augustine may have played a role in the development of the haunting image of Virgil's lighting the way for those to follow but not for himself ([Purg XXII 67-69]).  Moore (Moor.1896.1), p. 293, cites Augustine, Confessions IV.xvi (Pine.1961.1), p. 88: 'I had my back to the light and my face was turned towards the things which it illumined, so that my eyes, by which I saw the things which stood in the light, were themselves in darkness.'  (Moore gives credit to Scartazzini without identifying the work, if apparently not the commentary of 1900.)  The resemblance is striking, if not quite overwhelming.  It is at the close of this passage that Moore admits that he had not yet gotten round to a careful study of Dante's acquaintance with Augustine, a lacuna that he left unfilled.  While there has been recent work on the subject that is of some importance, the sort of careful monograph that would lay out the territory clearly and carefully is surely a serious lack in Dante studies.  See C.Par.XXXII.34-36.

      On the continuing complexity of the problem of Statius's supposed Christianity see, among many others, Brugnoli (Brug.1988.1), Scrivano (Scri.1992.1), and Heil (Heil.2002.2), pp. 69-115.  For the narrower discussion of the dependence of Dante's view on putative existing medieval sources for such a belief, see Padoan (Pado.1959.1), Ronconi's rejoinder (Ronc.1965.1), and Padoan's continuing insistence (Pado.1970.1).  It seems clear that Ronconi's view, that the conversion of Statius is entirely Dante's invention, is the only likely solution to an intriguing problem.  For Dante's impact on those Spanish writers who also (from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries) considered Statius a Christian, see Kallendorf and Kallendorf (Kall.2000.1).