Dante's Commedia

Theology as Poetry

Vittorio Montemaggi, Matthew Treherne, Vittorio Montemaggi, Matthew Treherne

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780268162009
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia italiana

In Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry, an international group of theologians and Dante scholars provide a uniquely rich set of perspectives focused on the relationship between theology and poetry in the Commedia. Examining Dante's treatment of questions of language, personhood, and the body; his engagement with the theological tradition he inherited; and the implications of his work for contemporary theology, the contributors argue for the close intersection of theology and poetry in the text as well as the importance of theology for Dante studies. Through discussion of issues ranging from Dante's use of imagery of the Church to the significance of the smile for his poetic project, the essayists offer convincing evidence that his theology is not what underlies his narrative poem, nor what is contained within it: it is instead fully integrated with its poetic and narrative texture.

As the essays demonstrate, the Commedia is firmly rooted in the medieval tradition of reflection on the nature of theological language, while simultaneously presenting its readers with unprecedented, sustained poetic experimentation. Understood in this way, Dante emerges as one of the most original theological voices of the Middle Ages.

Contributors: Piero Boitani, Oliver Davies, Theresa Federici, David F. Ford, Peter S. Hawkins, Douglas Hedley, Robin Kirkpatrick, Christian Moevs, Vittorio Montemaggi, Paola Nasti, John Took, Matthew Treherne, and Denys Turner.

1

Polemics of Praise

Theology as Text, Narrative, and Rhetoric in Dante’s Commedia

ROBIN KIRKPATRICK

POETRY, PROPOSITIONS, PERSONS

The conference from which this essay proceeds demonstrated a wide variety of ways in which theologians and literary critics may collaborate. Dante’s Commedia provided a natural focus for and encouragement to such collaboration. At the same time, the debate unsettled any easy assumptions about the relationship between theological and literary discussion. As quickly became apparent, it could not proceed fruitfully in an atmosphere of pious confidence, as if there were some such thing as “poetry,” apart from specific texts and specific authors, betraying a religious dimension; or as if there were some such thing as “theology,” in some equally generic way free from metaphor or simile in its deliverances. The specific matters. And this is as true of the Commedia—for all its apparently universal aspirations—as of any other text. Dante is a poet. But he is his own kind of poet. He is not Henry Vaughan, nor John Donne, nor even a born-again Bob Dylan. Not only did Dante write a long time ago, he also brought—in theory as well as practice—a passionately self-conscious interest to bear upon poetic and indeed linguistic tradition, seeking, in an unmistakably experimental spirit, to redefine the received idea of poetic art and even, perhaps, of language itself. One of the reasons why Dante was so beloved of twentieth-century modernists is that they recognized how far we had strayed in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic phases of our cultural history from a full understanding of his example. And indeed Dante’s poem will deny us, at every point, any preconceived or lately conceived notion as to what poetry essentially is.

In part, then, the purpose of the present essay is to insist upon the detail of Dante’s text, and (in outline at least) upon the often polemical theory that is instantiated in that text. But this aim is also associated here with a specific—though very radical—question: Is it possible to make valid statements about the Divinity in terms of human language and human logic? At first, it might seem that the very title of this volume of essays—Dante’s “Commedia”: Theology as Poetry—already implies a response. Does such a title not assume that, whatever the validity of logical propositions may be, a poetic text—the Commedia, that is—may exemplify a language of religious discourse different from, but no less valid than, the language of ratiocination? But then, by reputation, the Commedia might be thought to take an especially confident view of how propositions and poetry can be reconciled—and this impression seems to gather strength in the perspective of Dante’s Scholastic inheritance.

These initial considerations lead to a range of questions concerning the conception of the human person and the peculiar status that poets might be supposed to claim as prophets or scribes of the divine—and, indeed, the even more peculiar status of professional scholars, who fill their works, days, and bibliographies with well-judged deliverances and propositions about the workings of revelation. Poetry, propositions, persons: this alliterative mnemonic calls for theoretical nuance. If, in Dante’s phrase, the poet grows “macro” (Par. 25.3) [gaunt] in the service of heavenly and earthly truth, then what is his “person” if not an epicenter of self-denial? And if that is what our poet tells us about persons, what right have we—as his commentators—to grow fat on the textual proceeds? To put it another way: Is there any form of professional procedure—in theology or in literary criticism—in which we might willingly abandon the securities of second-order discourse—ever judicious, ever neutral—in favor of those dangerous waters of first-order discourse, where the heady confession of ignorance is as likely to be revealing as our learned footnotes?

As the second part of my essay’s title suggests, I wish to propose that both poetry and theology are better realized in a detailed engagement with texts and historical situations than in any pursuit of vision or theoretical system. On this view, close reading, or practical criticism, seems a very Dantean way to truth. And pursuing this view also allows me to insinuate the words that Dante attributes to Thomas Aquinas in Paradiso 13:

E questo ti sia sempre piombo a’ piedi,

per farti mover lento com’ uom lasso

e al sì e al no che tu non vedi:

ché quelli è tra li stolti bene a basso,

che sanza distinzione afferma e nega

ne l’un così come ne l’altro passo;

perch’ elli ’ncontra che più volte piega

l’oppinïon corrente in falsa parte,

e poi l’affetto l’intelletto lega.

(112–20)

[And let this be a lead weight on your feet, / so that you move as slow as if worn out / to any “yes” or “no” unclear to you. / For no fool is as low as one / who taking either of these steps will fail / affirming or denying in distinction. / So often when our judgement rushes on, / it happens that we veer in false directions / and then emotions bind the intellect.]

These are words that deserve to stand as an epigraph to any volume of essays, let alone the present one. In the preceding cantos, Aquinas offers a fairly comprehensive picture of the workings of the created universe but does so, surprisingly, to explain a single phrase uttered in Paradiso 10—“non surse il secondo” (114) [no second ever rose]—in which we find encapsulated the equally surprising proposition that King Solomon was the wisest of all natural-born human beings. Aquinas then concludes with these lines, which, so far from emphasizing the competence of logical analysis, insist upon an extreme caution and even a pedestrian attention to the use of words (13.112–14). Discrimination and linguistic tact are, it seems, for Dante at least, the core of the example that he took from Aquinas. Is not this tantamount to viewing the theologian Aquinas as a literary critic?

Returning briefly to the three enticing Ps—poetry, persons, propositions—there is little doubt that Dante’s approach to issues such as these adds to their implication. Take, first, the question of what we think poetry to be; or, more precisely, what we think is the relation between poetic utterance and theological understanding or religious practice. A familiar answer will evoke the notion of epiphany to suggest that artistic utterance can momentarily present us with a world transfigured, either by recording those moments when the lighting-effects of eternity seem to break through our temporal gloom, or even, in some cases, by sheer brilliance of form, causing an effect of unanticipated splendor. Or else poetry and the arts are described as somehow “sacramental” in character, where the notion of the sacramental is understood along the same conceptual lines as that of the epiphanic just outlined above, and without taking into account the theological complexity any discussion of the sacramental requires. In whichever version, the chosen example is likely to be Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”¹ Yet it is not self-evident that these expectations comprehensively define the possibilities of what poetry can do for the religious mind. It is not clear that they even do justice to Hopkins. And as for Dante, the thrust of my argument in this essay is that they will not do at all.

EPIPHANIES, “PLOD,” AND TIME

Our talk of epiphanies can easily invite us to a sort of visionary enthusiasm. Yet, whether pro or con such usage, there is a need for caution here. This is especially important when notions of the epiphanic are evoked through reference to the “sacramental.” For it seems to me important—for literary critical as well as devotional reasons—that references to the sacramental should be associated conceptually with the notion of sacerdotal involvement. Priesthood is uniquely and indissolubly tied to the unknown and the unknowable—that Otherness on which all known and knowable existences depend. And whenever Dante refers with horror to the Church as the Whore of Babylon—which is to say, frequently—he demonstrates how dependent he saw himself to be upon the actions of true priesthood—true, beyond all the dreadful things he did know about the Church and its priests.

There is indeed a point at which priests and poets may have something in common: the interest they share in time. Priests are trained in a gamut of temporal possibilities, from the pastoral ebb and flow of life and death, to the surges of tradition, to the delicate rhythms of the liturgical year; and are thus qualified to attempt those elite syncopations in which the sacraments reconfigure our normal lumber. Poets in their own, more limited way—in metrical sensitivity—have at least an analogous function in their experiments and performances in time. Poets may of course imagine transcendence. But poems, especially if they happen to be narrative poems, are self-evidently written along a line obedient to the sentences that human beings speak and understand. So my first polemic is directed against the uses and abuses that the word “epiphany” has suffered on the lips of literary critics when it is deployed, more or less loosely, to suggest that lyric poetry in particular may open for us a bright window on the eternal or convince us that we human beings are, after all, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, “seeing things”—not merely things but things that can see and see things anew.²

Now, I do not deny that lyric poetry can stretch us to new lucidities. So, too, an Olympic high-board diver can expand our perceptions of muscle control and the sheen of air and water. Yet there are reasons—some of them theoretical, some of them specifically Dantean—to wonder whether the incandescent swoop of lyrical vision may sometimes be a camera-trick, or, less skeptically, whether such moments are all that poetry can encompass. Theoretically—and therefore, of course, in current circumstances skeptically—we have been urged by the modern Sorbonne to wonder whether words can ever deliver any vision at all. Words are not windows but rather reflective surfaces, subtly giving back—precisely because of the darkness beyond—the vestigial tracings of our own features and gestures. I shall argue later that Dante, who is not only a theorist but also a great comic writer, understands very well that, as human beings, we live most truly when we live on a comically small scale, within the limits of our human lineaments. It is also true, however, that Dante—in theory as well as in practice—has very little truck with unqualified lyricism. After all, in writing the Commedia he consciously abandons, once and for all, his earlier lyric practice and embraces the example of Virgil: he writes an epic narrative, an account of a journey articulated according to an interest in sequence rather than interruptions to that sequence. Immediately, this involves an alteration in his representation of time. The Vita nuova had been punctuated by visions, and by that marvelous nexus of terms that denote the life-renewing capacity of the contemplative eye: “mirare,” “miracolo,” “ammirazione”; a gazing at the unexpected, a filling of the mind with light. I am not forgetting that the narrative of the Commedia represents a journey back to Beatrice. Nor am I ignoring the passage in the Convivio where Dante speaks in unambiguously epiphanic and sacramental terms of his own use of vernacular Italian as a radiant “new sun,” offered, as in the miracle of loaves and fishes, to a hungry multitude.³ Yet the shift in genre to epic narrative remains profoundly significant in assessing his understanding of language and indeed of thought itself. Epic poems take time—and are often about our use of time in destroying or founding cities. And poetry takes time especially when seen under another aspect that Dante constantly emphasizes—which is to say, his interest in the painstaking and time-consuming processes of the poetic craft. The emphasis in the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia falls less upon poetic vision than upon poetic workmanship—as it does also throughout the Commedia itself. The poet, for Dante, is one who labors in the “workshop of rhetoric,” who files and polishes or else who weaves subtle textures out of words that, in Dante’s own analogy, are as shaggy or silken as the fabrics of the Florentine clothing industry.⁴ The Paradiso is his final labor—his “ultimo lavoro”—requiring the poet often to “put his back into it,” as in Paradiso 23:

Se mo sonasser tutte quelle lingue

che Polimnía con le suore fero

del latte lor dolcissimo piu pingue,

per aiutarmi, al millesmo del vero

non si verria, cantando il santo riso

e quanto il santo aspetto facea mero;

e così, figurando il paradiso,

convien saltar lo sacrato poema,

come chi trova suo cammin riciso.

Ma chi pensasse il ponderoso tema

e l’omero mortal che se ne carca,

nol biasmerebbe se sott’ esso trema.

(55–66)

[Even if all those voices were to sound / that Polyhymnia and her sister muses / fed on their sweetest milk so richly once, / and aid me, singing of that holy smile / and how her holy look grew purer still, / I’d still not reach one thousandth of the truth. / And so, imagining this Paradise, / the sacred epic has to make a leap, / as when we find the road ahead cut off. / Yet no one if they’ve gauged that weighty theme— / and seen what mortal shoulders bear the load— / would criticize such trembling backing-out.]

When Dante does speak of vision and prophetic furor—alluding in De vulgari eloquentia 2.4 to the journey of Aeneas to the underworld in Aeneid book 6—his attention falls less upon the eagle-flight of prophetic rapture than upon the sheer difficulty of getting back into the temporal world: that is the “opus” that is the “labor,” the strenuousness that poetry demands. To use Hopkins’s phrase, “shéer plód makes plough down sillion / Shine” (“The Windhover”). The ploughshare glitters through the friction of the furrow. Grace shines, however unexpectedly and unconstrainedly, on our pedestrian works. Not perhaps on works that are “good” by any human standard, but on the working evidence of human potentiality, on those textured manifestations of being which demonstrate that we are alive. It greatly complicates the issue that Hopkins was a priest. Dante was not. But Dante did know how to render up the work of human hand for whatever benediction may then fall upon it. Few passages in the Commedia are more moving than the opening of Paradiso 25, in which Dante imagines the remote contingency, scarcely calculable within the parameters of temporal cause and effect, that his poem might win for him not a heavenly crown but a return to Florence, and that in returning he will receive the laurel crown in the very place where, at baptism, his name was first given him. The analogy is plain: in terms of theological hope, Dante submits to the sacraments, but in terms of poetry, he depends for his temporal identity on the responses of those who read him in his work.

There is, however, another way in which the poetry of Hopkins as well as Dante demands that we be cautious in our employment of the epiphany trope. For in Hopkins, poetic epiphanies are almost invariably—and literally—manifestations of the person of Christ. The whole birth-narrative of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” illustrates this, as do these lines from “As kingfishers catch fire …”:

for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

This is a rather different epiphany from those that, say, T. S. Eliot might encourage. Eliot, influentially, was concerned with seeing the transfiguration of things, whereby the dry pools of the wasteland bloom with light and roses and fire intertwine. Notoriously, however, he is hopeless (in every sense of the word) with people. But...