A theological perspective on Dante’s work

Reading Dante's Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter

BY ROWAN WILLIAMS

Vittorio Montemaggi

READING DANTE’S COMMEDIA AS THEOLOGY

Divinity realized in human encounter

328pp. Oxford University Press. £56 (US $78).

Disarmingly, we are told at the very beginning of this rich and unusual book that the readers at Oxford University Press were sharply divided about its merits. Vittorio Montemaggi is openly challenging the received style of academic monographs by writing in a strongly personal and even anecdotal register: he is determined to write as if it mattered that his argument had been matured in conversation with numerous colleagues and students, and so all are given their due acknowledgement, often at great length. The reader has to decide in the first chapter if this is – as the author insists – a proper way of handling the distinctive subject matter of the book: Montemaggi’s point throughout is that “to read the Commedia as theology is to consider our reading a form of human encounter with its author”. And if this is so, then the human encounters that have shaped this interpretation are intrinsic to the offering of a theological perspective on Dante’s work. We are better able to think through the various ways in which Dante en­gages the reader in complex, challenging and self-reflexive processes of discovery if we are fully conscious of how our own readings are embedded in comparable kinds of engagement, the ways in which we allow ourselves to be drawn into discovery. If the Commedia is about “an ever-growing network of manifest­ations of love”, understanding it involves some enactment of the subject matter.

None of this means for a moment that Montemaggi is arguing for an impressionistic or simply pious reading. The argumentation is tight and the range of reference to contemporary Dante scholarship in most European languages is impressive. Every chapter contains illuminating new insights into the text. Thus we are given a detailed discussion of what it means for Dante to claim that his work has both human and divine sources or even authorship (al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra, Paradiso 25.2): he writes avowedly as someone who participates in the Church, and thus in the gift of supernatural charity. And what he does qua recipient of supernatural charity includes his poetry. This does not mean that he confuses his outstanding poetic achievement with grace; simply that he recognizes that human action in the Church interweaves created and uncreated agency to the degree that we cannot separate them out into two discrete “things”. And if the poetry is then to point effectively to the grace with which it is shot through, it has to do so – paradoxically – by drawing attention to its own fallibility, indeed its own unconquered sin­fulness. Dante’s unapologetic display of his own pride, resentment, arrogance and so on becomes a confirmation of the divine purpose and providential direction of the poem: “we are asked to believe that the poem can be true – that Dante will be able one day to partake perfectly in eternal glory – not only because of his ability, but also on account of his limitations, and of his repenting for them”. And our response – ideally a response likewise informed by supernatural charity – becomes in turn part of what will secure Dante’s salvation. The repentant poet is a “signifier of the divine” to the extent that he intends to convey to us the networks of love in and through the display simultaneously of his achievement and of his imperfection and sin; we as readers become such signifiers ourselves if we absorb the same intention and the same repentance and thus establish the success of the poet’s strategy. Montemaggi’s subtle discussion of the Terrace of Envy in Purgatorio 11 shows how Dante’s shameless allusion to his own genius is framed and relativized both by the insistence on the priority of the divine Word (without which nothing has value in itself) and by the juxta­position of his implied self-praise with the recognition of the infantile character of all that he or anyone here below can say of God. Dante acknowledges not only his limits but his sin and, if we are able to recognize our place within the networks of love, we shall both share his penitent honesty and pray for his salvation.

Another careful and illuminating discussion follows, dealing with the contentious question of what happens to Virgil at the end of the Purgatorio. So many readers have been left uneasy with Virgil’s “dismissal”, the apparently uncompromising recognition that he has simply and flatly missed the bus in terms of the networks of redeeming charity by dying too soon. But in a long treatment of this question, occupying a good half of the last section, Montemaggi points us to a host of clues that might make us pause before assuming that Virgil’s fate is as settled as we might think. This is not only about the pre-Christian characters (Trajan and Cato) who are admitted to the fellowship of the saved; it is also about the way in which Virgil’s virtues, and indeed the whole direction of Virgil’s vision are evoked for us in language that echoes the theologically charged accounts of holiness that Dante provides. Virgil looks heavenwards and desires: Dante recognizes Virgil’s desire (as expressed in his poetry) and praises him in God’s presence, as if he is interceding for him. Montemaggi suggests that the smile Virgil exchanges with Statius (Purgatorio 28.146) is a giveaway: “Virgil does not respond to his limitations with anxiety but with self-conscious joy”. For a moment he is at one with the redeemed Statius, and this is surely an indicator of some sort of grace bestowed or promise hinted at. The real point, though, is that Dante loves Virgil and is inviting us to love him too. But how can we love without desiring the ultimate good of the loved one? Are we then being invited to pray for Virgil, just as we are for Dante? Monte­maggi argues that all this is something designed to draw our attention to the fictional character of the poem: Dante is not in fact describing simply or “objectively” what he sees, he is exercising a theologically informed imagi­nation so as to kindle in us a theologically informed charity. And if so, perhaps the message is that Virgil’s fate is in our hands. The swirl of feeling and perception around the figure of Virgil becomes part of the central theological strategy of the Commedia – the summons to sinful and compromised members of the Body of Christ to exercise their charity (always already exceeding their capacity) in relation to God and one another.

So this is a satisfying and enormously suggestive book, arguing not the obvious point that Dante’s poetry is consistently inflected by theological concerns (which is like saying that it’s written in Italian), but a more radical thesis – that the poem seeks to enact its subject matter. It does so, Montemaggi contends, not only by inviting us into the mystery of divine love in general terms, but by two very specific kinds of challenge. We are invited to ask ourselves as readers what it would mean for us to become signifiers of God as Dante claims to be, finite agents of an infinite authorship; and we are reminded – in the light of this – that we as readers are equipped to make a difference to the author of the poem – and, indeed, to those he writes about insofar as they are in need of our solidarity and prayer. And this recasts entirely the way in which we look for theology in the work. These are not questions about “content”. Montemaggi argues pro­vo­catively that there can be no “doctrine or content” in the Commedia within the metaphysical framework that Dante assumes. The poem is not a versification of doctrinal propositions, but an attempt to allow the being of the Christian God to become transparent and actively transformative in the words recited and read or heard. The poem is an incarnation, remotely comparable to that focal and unique coincidence of finite and infinite action which is Christ’s life. The reader may or may not accept the terms of the relationships pre­supposed in the poem (namely the relationships between God and poet, poet and reader, reader and fellow believer or needy soul), but an agnostic or otherwise detached reader will not understand the poem without grasping that this is the sort of thing it is.

Montemaggi has written a book that invites a new look at what we mean by theological writing in general, as well as theological poetry – though this new look is arguably just a fresh statement of what pre-modern theology at its most self-aware took for granted. It is a pre-modern agenda, we might say, enacted in a very contemporary idiom, in which questions about authorial dependability or textual finality are deployed in order to reinforce the conviction that an intelligent and responsible reading of this text – and others – will be one that reads its contradictions and unresolved polarities as triggers for spiritual and imaginative change in the reader. There are obviously questions that will occur to many readers, the most uncomfortable of which is just how this reading will work with the more openly partisan – not to mention the more spectacularly vengeful – passages of the Inferno. Granted all that Montemaggio says about Dante’s self-awareness, it is a bit of a strain to discern this in a good deal of the first part of the Commedia, and it is not surprising that references to it are fewer in number overall than to the other two sections (the Paradiso, understandably, has the lion’s share of citation and discussion).

But perhaps the point is precisely that we need to read the whole thing as a journey away from the claustrophobic politics of Dante’s Hell. There is still a tendency among not very attentive readers – not to mention people who have read almost nothing of the work but have picked up the odd juicy morsel – to think of the Inferno as the really “interesting” section of the poem, the part where recognizable human emotion is most dramatically depicted and evoked: guilty love, transgression, punishment, tragic disaster and horror. It is salutary to remember that we as readers are not meant to linger in Hell and that, for all Dante’s obsessional score-settling in the Inferno, this is not what he intends to write about. 

............................

Read more: www.the-tls.co.uk