THOSE who will call this time ancient are … you and I. The phrase is used by Dante in a famous passage of the Paradiso to indicate his posterity. It is a beautiful phrase, color che questo tempo chiameranno antico, for it implies a keen sense of the future on Dante’s part, and also gives the future a very peculiar connotation, that of an age which looks as it were mainly to the past, at Dante’s own time, and considers it not just old, but ancient. With a single stroke, the line in fact creates the future and shapes it as our present contemplating the abyss of time, at the beginning of which lies the speaker’s present becoming in his own vision and under our very eyes a remote antiquity. There is only one other example I know in literature ancient, medieval, modern, and post-modern, of a sight that can leap so far and ‘contain’ the future – God’s promise to Abraham of a seed as countless as the stars in Genesis, initiating the whole history of Israel, Christianity, and Islam.
This is the kind of future I am going to look into in this paper: the future a poet invents at the end of an epoch which its future eventually called the Middle Ages. I shall speak of Dante because I think he sums up several medieval notions of the future while transcending them both culturally and philosophically, and because I hope that his summa might provide a starting-point for our debate. Let me begin, therefore, by examining the passage from which the momentous line of my title comes. We are in the fifth heaven of Paradise, that of Mars, and Dante, accompanied by Beatrice, is talking to his ancestor, the Crusader Cacciaguida. Cacciaguida has, in Canto XV of Paradiso, welcomed his descendant with a series of lofty greetings that indirectly present Dante as a new Aeneas and a new Messiah. Then, through Cantos XV–XVI, he has described at length the virtuous Florence of the good old days. Finally, in Canto XVII he has, at his great-grandchild’s own request, disclosed to Dante his imminent future: his exile, his political isolation, his first asylum at the court of Cangrande della Scala.