If the DVE is a treatise on language and speech acts, Genesis offered Dante many examples of primal “speech acts.” The first thing we must agree on, however, is what “speaking” means. Certainly, every sign—as Augustine had already remarked—is something perceptible to the senses that serves to bring to mind something different from itself, but this definition (which could also refer to the knot I tie in my handkerchief to remind me of a task I must do) does not yet imply a communicative relationship articulated between two subjects. Rosier-Catach (2006) sees this communicative aspect underscored instead by definitions like the one in Calcidius’s Latin translation of the Timaeus, later echoed by Thomas Aquinas (“ut Plato dicit, sermo ad hoc datus est nobis ut cognoscamus voluntatis indicia” [“As Plato says, speech was given to us so we could know signs of others’ wills”], De veritate 9, 4, 7).1 If Dante understood a speech act in this way, then we ought not to say that God “speaks” when he pronounces the fiat lux, as a result of which “there was light” (Gen. 1:3–4);2 and the same could be said for other similar expressions used in the course of creation. Here God seems instead to know “how to do things with words,” bringing into play a magic, operative, performative quality of the word—thus setting a dangerous precedent for all future followers of the occult sciences, convinced they can change the course of events simply by uttering a few para-Hebraic sounds. In the same way it is not clear what God was up to when, for example, He called (“appellavit”) light “day” and darkness “night,” seeing that He had no need to communicate those names to anyone, least of all Himself.
Dante is nonetheless aware of the fact that the Bible often speaks in a figurative way, and he does not make these divine “words” the object of his reflection, considering that, as far as he is concerned, it is evident that the gift of speech has been conferred on man alone (“patet soli homini datum fuisse loqui,” DVE I, ii, 8). As he will repeat on a number of occasions, the ability to speak belongs only to mankind: the angels don’t have it (they are gifted with an “ineffable intellectual ability,” which allows each of them to understand the thought of all the others, or, alternatively, all of them read the thoughts of all the others in the mind of God) and the demons (who are already reciprocally aware of the depths of their own perfidy) don’t have it either. And—we may add—if the angels have no use for speech, the same is even truer of God when He was creating the universe.
It is the intention of the DVE, therefore, to deal solely with human speech, inasmuch as man is guided by his reason, which in single individuals assumes different forms of judgment and discernment, and requires a faculty that will permit the speaker to transmit an intellectual content through signs perceptible to the senses, in a relationship between sound and sense that he can recognize (in accordance with tradition) ad placitum, in other words, as conventionally agreed upon.3
Nevertheless, Dante still has to explain the episode recounted in Genesis 2:16–17, when the Lord speaks to man for the first time, placing at Adam’s disposal all the resources of the Earthly Paradise, and commanding him not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil. Clearly, what we have here is an initial act of communication, which would contradict the idea that man was the first to use language. Dante gets out of this by affirming that the fact that God communicated something to Adam does not mean that He did so verbally, but (and this traditional idea comes from Psalm 148: “fire and hail, snow and frost, stormy wind fulfilling his command” [“ignis grando nix glacies spiritus procellarum quae faciunt verbum eius”—the verb “faciunt” in the Vulgate is ambiguous and could mean “that do his word” or “that make up his word”]) He could have expressed himself through atmospheric phenomena, such as thunderclaps and lightning.
Having clarified these issues, Dante might at this point have discussed how Adam spoke when the Lord (Gen. 2:19) formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name (“omne enim, quod vocavit Adam animae viventis, ipsum est nomen eius”). Curiously enough, this role of Adam as nomothete (with the tremendous problem, touched on in Plato’s Cratylus, and which will obsess the coming centuries, that is, on what basis did Adam name the animals—with the names due to them because of their natures or with those that he himself arbitrarily chose to assign, ad placitum) is ignored by Dante. Nor is that all. Disregarding the fact that, in order to name the animals, Adam must have spoken in some way, Dante confesses to being perplexed by the fact that “according to what it says at the beginning of Genesis” the first to speak was the “most presumptuous” Eve (“mulierem invenitur ante omnes fuisse locutam” [“we find that a woman spoke before anyone else”] DVE I, iv, 3), when she engaged in dialogue with the serpent, and he finds it unbecoming that such a noble act of the human race should have emerged, not from the lips of a man but from those of a woman (“inconvenienter putatur tam egregium humani generis actum non prius a viro quam a femina profluxisse” [“it may be thought unseemly that so distinguished an action of the human race should first have been performed by a woman rather than a man”] DVE I, iv, 3, p. 9).
In fact, this observation (apart from the puzzling display of antifeminism on the part of a poet who sang the praises of a donna angelicata or a mortal woman glorified as an angel)—if we exclude the doubtful “words” attributed to God, Adam is the first to speak—first of all when he names the animals, and then when he expresses his satisfaction with the appearance of Eve. Indeed, in the latter case, an entire utterance of his is cited for the first time: “dixitque Adam hoc nunc os ex ossibus meis et caro de carne mea haec vocabitur virago quoniam de viro sumpta est” (“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man”). Mengaldo (1979: 42) suggests that, since for Dante people speak to externalize the thoughts in their minds, and speech is therefore a dialogical phenomenon, what Dante meant to say was that what we have between Eve and the serpent is the first dialogue, and hence the first linguistic act expressed through the physical production of meaningful sounds. Which would lead us to believe that when Adam is pleased with the appearance of Eve and “says” what he says, maybe he says it to himself, and that (but perhaps we are overmodernizing Dante) the naming of the animals ought not to be considered a linguistic act but a mere metalinguistic foundation.
However we may wish to interpret this liberty that Dante takes as a reader of the Bible, Mengaldo’s suggestion nonetheless prompts us to clarify what a linguistic act, as distinct from a language, meant for Dante, in other words to ask ourselves whether or not there is in Dante a critical awareness of the difference (to use the Saussurean terminology) between langue and parole.