Page 26 - GALIET EXILE: Dante IV+

Galiet & Galiet
the proper order of things: a misplacement, as if bread were turned or made the wrong way, as if evil were actually riding upon its crust, breeding plenty nasty quarrels that make angels weep. Salt, too, destroys. The Romans, after the destruction of Carthage, made the countryside barren by scattering as much salt as Abimelech did with his conquered city of Schechem (Judges 9:45).
Yet, paradoxically, salt is also that which heals, preserves and drives off daemons. Dante during his lifetime exile, like bread, undergoes a process of transformation that culminates in spiritual wholeness and reintegration, as if his exilic ‘salty bread’ had transformed itself unto Christ’s eternal Bread of Life. Dante, just as the process of bread making, will be reaped, threshed, milled, sifted, salted, kneaded, moulded, left to ‘rise’ (as in Purgatorio) before being placed through the fiery heat of the oven’s walls (alluding to his crossing of the wall of fire). In this process, Dante will expand and become as full and whole as the spiritual bread of life that nourishes desolate pilgrims in deserts and mounts, through hungry days and nights. As such, he will symbolize the spiritual nourishment, which begins with the twelve loaves of showbread found in the Tabernacle (Ex. 25:30) and ends with the laborious Christian spiritual life, blessed with heaven’s sanctity.
The duality of salt ultimately heals Dante’s wounds. Just as Elisha purifies a spring by casting salt into it (2 Kings 2: 19-22), Dante’s experience will purify him as he crosses Lethe and Eunoe’s Rivers. Just as Jesus referred to his disciples as the “salt of the earth” in his Sermon on the Mount (Mat. 5:13), Dante the Pilgrim will become a devout disciple by eating his share of the salty bread of the world. Just as St. Jerome calls Christ ‘the redeeming salt that penetrates Heaven and Earth,’ so Dante the pilgrim becomes the very bread and salt of Dante the poet and of every pilgrim reader who dares
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