Dante Alighieri

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DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321), Italian poet, theologian, and philosopher. Dante offered in his Commedia a "sacred poem" of enormous erudition and aesthetic power, which more than any other work of Christian literature merits the appellation conferred on it by a mid-sixteenth-century edition: "divine." After producing the Vita nuova in 1295, Dante entered the volatile world of Florentine politics, which, however unjustly, subsequently led to his banishment from the city in 1302. In exile for the remainder of his life, he wrote the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the De monarchia in the following decade, works that together reveal a commonality of themes: an admiration for the Latin classics, a dedication to the study of philosophy, and a commitment to the revival of the Roman imperial ideal. These concerns are all transfigured in the long and elaborate course of the Commedia (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), which represents an encyclopedic synthesis of late medieval thought subsumed within an overarching theological vision. The poem is at once profoundly traditional in its religious ordering of human experience and an innovation of substance and form that suggests an utterly new mentality at work. It can be seen both as an attempt to exorcise what would shortly become the spirit of the Renaissance and yet also as a brilliant precursor of it.

Dante came of age in Florence at a time when the papacy was embroiled with the Holy Roman Empire over temporal jurisdiction in Italy. Widespread corruption in the church, as well as within the powerful mendicant orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, seemed to give rise to many individualistic and charismatic expressions of piety that, while passionately Catholic, nonetheless found themselves alienated from the established religious institutions and hierarchies. It is in this context that a devout layman like Dante, discovering himself a mere "party of one," could dare to arrogate to himself the quasi-biblical role of prophet. He became a voice crying in the wilderness, instructing the powers of church and state in their true responsibilities at the same time that he was attempting to woo the ordinary reader (in a daring use of the vernacular for so ambitious a poetic work) into a full conversion of the heart.

Whatever the poet's personal upbringing may have given him, it is known that he studied for an extended period "in the schools of the religious orders and at the disputations of the philosophers" (Convivio 2.12). At Santa Croce he would have been exposed to the wealth of Franciscan piety, while at Santa Maria Novella the Dominican Remigio de' Girolami expounded the theology of Thomas Aquinas with special regard for the Aristotelian philosophy that subtends it. In such an intellectual atmosphere Dante found validated what was to be one of the most impressive characteristics of his own work: the massive appropriation of pagan and classical writers for Christian reflection and use.

In assessing Dante's relation to medieval theology and religious thought it is commonplace to emphasize the formative influence of "the Philosopher" (Aristotle) and the "Angelic Doctor" (Thomas); that is, to stress his strong debt to Scholasticism. It must be remembered, however, that the poet everywhere shows himself to be an independent and eclectic thinker, whose imaginative meditation on the Christian faith leads him far and wide: to the systematics of Peter Lombard, the Platonism of Bonaventure, the mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux and the Victorines, the biblical exegesis (as well as the retrospective confessional mode) of Augustine. Thus, while we may well speak of Dante as standing at the crossroads of medieval religious thought, the intersection is one that he personally constructed rather than discovered readymade. The synthesis of the Commedia is idiosyncratically his own.

As a propagator of the Christian religion Dante must, of course, be assessed by the achievement of his great poem, with its account of the state of the soul after death portrayed in the course of a journey undertaken by the poet himself (lasting from Good Friday 1300 to the Wednesday of Easter Week) through the realms of damnation, purgation, and beatitude. Granted this extraordinary experience through the intercession of his deceased love, Beatrice, the pilgrim-poet is led step by step through a process of conversion by a series of guides and mediators: the pagan poet Vergil, Beatrice herself, and the churchman-mystic-crusader Bernard. But in its larger aspect, the poem is itself an invitation to conversion: to the individual reader, to rediscover the Gospels' "true way"; to the church, to recover its spiritual mission; and to the state, to exercise its divinely ordained mandate to foster temporal well-being.

There are other transformations as well. Hell is portrayed not as a place of arbitrary horror, but as the eternal living out of the soul's self-choice, whereby punishments not only fit but express the crimes of sin. Dante also brings Purgatory aboveground and into the sun, turning the traditional place of torturous penance into more of a hospital or school than a prison house. No less striking is the presentation of Beatrice, at once the earthly lover praised in the youthful pages of the Vita nuova and the Christ-event for Dante: a woman in whom we see human eros accorded an unprecedented place in the scheme of human salvation. But perhaps most significant of all—and most singularly responsible for the Commedia's immense and enduring popularity—is Dante's superb representation of the self: ineradicable even in death; more vivid than the theological context in which it is eternally envisioned; more subtly and realistically portrayed than in any other work of medieval literature. The poem's itinerary leads us along the paths of theology to a vision of God, but its hundred cantos offer an investigation of human nature and culture that grounds the reader's attention in the complex realities of earth.

The quantity of secondary material on Dante written in English alone is staggering. Carole Slade's extensive and somewhat annotated bibliography in Approaches to Teaching Dante's Divine Comedy (New York, 1982) gives a fine sense of the whole range. Among those works that deal sensitively with Dante's relation to Christian belief and tradition, one needs to accord special tribute to the critical oeuvre of Charles S. Singleton, who has exerted a powerful influence on American studies of Dante by underscoring the importance of the poem's theological assumptions. In addition to Singleton's translation and commentary (Princeton, 1970–1975), there are his earlier works: An Essay on the Vita Nuova (Cambridge, U.K. 1949), Dante Studies 1: Commedia, Elements of Structure, 2d ed. (Baltimore, 1977), and Dante Studies 2: Journey to Beatrice, 2d ed. (Baltimore, 1977). Charles Williams's The Figure of Beatrice (London, 1958) gives a coherent theological reading of all of Dante's works, whose point of view informs not only Dorothy Sayers's commentary and notes (Harmondsworth, 1951–1967) but her Introductory Papers on Dante (New York, 1954) and Further Papers on Dante (New York, 1957). There are also brilliant insights into the religious ethos of the Commedia in Erich Auerbach's Dante: Poet of the Secular World (Chicago, 1961) as well as in an important chapter of his Mimesis (Princeton, 1953). Robert Hollander's Allegory in Dante's Commedia (Princeton, 1969) and Studies in Dante (Ravenna, 1980) deal masterfully with the poet's claim to write an "allegory of the theologians" (and therefore in the manner of scripture itself). John Freccero's many brilliant essays on the Commedia, collected under the title The Poetry of Conversion (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), stress the poet's debt to Augustine's Confessions and the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. The latter connection is explored in Joseph Anthony Mazzeo's Structure and Thought in the Paradiso (Ithaca, N.Y., 1958). Finally, William Anderson's Dante the Maker (Boston, 1980) takes seriously the visionary origin of the Commedia and therefore forces us to examine again the literal level of the poem and its bid to be believed as a genuine vision of God.