On Catholic Imagination, Part 8: Dante Among Thelogians

Episode Topic: Dante Among Thelogians

Step into the celestial rose of the “Dante Among Theologians” project. This international collaboration invites you to rediscover Dante’s vision not merely as verse, but as a living source of wisdom and spiritual insight. Witness a transformative journey where the God of Love fulfills our deepest desires across centuries and disciplines.

Featured Speakers:

• Jennifer Newsome Martin '07 M.T.S., '12 Ph.D., University of Notre Dame
• George Corbett, University of St. Andrews
• Vittorio Montemaggi, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/b39fad.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled On Catholic Imagination.

Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.

• Learn more about ThinkND and register for upcoming live events at think.nd.edu.
• Join our LinkedIn community for updates, episode clips, and more.

Transcript

Introduction and the Collaborators

1 0:09

Good afternoon, friends. Thank you for being here It has really been a genuine joy to be with you all these past few days of this conference. I can truly think of almost nothing more Dantean, nothing more evocative of the celestial rose of the Paradiso than all of us, students, staff, faculty, artists, writers, filmmakers, theologians, historians, poets, musicians, iconographers, winemakers, friends, young and old, clergy and lay, ingathered and bound by love into one single volume. This conference is to me also Dantean and Paradisal insofar as it is and has been, as in Cantos 11 and 12 of the Paradiso, a space of non-competitive and mutual praise. Dominicans praising Franciscans, Franciscans praising Dominicans, theologians praising poets, poets praising theologians. Because as Dante put it with respect to St. Thomas and St. Francis, "In praising either prince, one praises both. The labors of the two were toward one goal." It is likewise so here in this small taste we have of heavenly existence The primary purpose of this panel is not simply to read a few papers about Dante within the context of the broad theme of Catholic imagination, but also to offer a kind of soft launch of a new collaborative initiative between the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, the Devers Family Program in Dante Studies, and my friends George Corbett from the University of St. Andrews and Vittorio Montemaggi from the Notre Dame Global Gateway in London. My role is to briefly introduce the kinds of things we are envisioning for this international, interdisciplinary, cross-institutional collaboration, and then to invite both George and Vittorio to offer lengthier case studies of ongoing research projects which could and would have a home within the broader Dante Among Theologians research program Before we get to those details, I'd like to offer some formal introductions of my colleagues and friends. George Corbett is Professor of Theology in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Professor Corbett has two principal areas of research and teaching: theology and the arts, and historical and systematic theology. Prior to joining the School of Divinity in two thousand and fifteen, he held positions as Junior Research Fellow in Philosophy, Trinity College, and Affiliated Lecturer, University of Cambridge, where he taught English literature, Italian literature, and theology. He received his BA, MPhil, and PhD, all from the University of Cambridge. He studied in Pisa as the Erasmus Socrates Exchange Scholar, Rome, and Montella. Professor Corbett directs a Thomistic Center for Philosophy and Scholastic Theology, TheoArtistry, a project linking up theologians and artists, and also co-directs the collaborative Imlet in Sacred Music. Vittorio Montemaggi is the Academic Director of Notre Dame's International Global London Gateway and the Director of the Von Hugel Institute for Critical Catholic Inquiry at St. Edmund's College, Cambridge. Vittorio previously served on the faculty here at the University of Notre Dame between two thousand and nine and two thousand seventeen, and most recently as a lecturer in religion, literature, and the arts at King's College London. His research interests include the relationship between literary and theological reflection, the relationship between language, truth, and love, and the interconnections between the question of the relationship between theism and atheism, and that of the relationship between tragedy and comedy. His research to date has focused primarily on the works of Dante and Primo Levi, while his comparative interests also entail exploration of the works of Gregory the Great, Catherine of Siena, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and Roberto Benigni. As for me, I serve as the John J. Cavanaugh Associate Professor of Humanities in the Program of Liberal Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Theology, as well as serving as the new Director of the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. In the Department of Theology, I am a systematic theologian who works on theological aesthetics, religion and literature, Trinitarian theology, and resource mon theology. In PLS, Notre Dame's Great Books major, I have the opportunity to teach and reflect upon classical core texts in literature, philosophy, theology, history, and science that span the duration of primarily Western culture. In these small Socratic-style seminars, we read such diverse authors as Homer, Herodotus, Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Dante, of course, Chaucer, Luther, Montaigne, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Virginia Woolf. I could go on.

Why Dante Matters to Theology

1 5:43

But this kind of intimate text and student-centric teaching means that I've been reading Dante's Divine Comedy almost every year on repeat for well over a decade. His poetry is in my bones and imprinted indelibly upon my heart. The more I read and teach and write about Dante from the perspective of systematic theology, religion and literature, and great books pedagogy, the more I have found within those inimitable pages not only the freshness and vitality of a work of indisputable genius, but also a living source of beauty, wisdom, and spiritual insight To read Dante is to be drawn into the dramatic unfolding of his own tr- transformative conversion. To witness his ego give way and feel our own egos begin to give way in the reception of the capacious gift of the beatific vision of God. Dante's readers watch him realize and likewise make us realize that what it is we really and truly desire is nothing other than the God of love who is the end of all desires. Moreover, the complexity and richness of Dante's corpus by its very nature seems to invite and put more strongly even to require rich interdisciplinary reflection. Historians, Italianists, theologians, political scientists, literature scholars, and ordinary lay readers ought all come together in another version of the celestial rose to consider the intellectual, poetic, and spiritual riches therein. It was informal conversations around this very conviction that brought the three of us together. For several years now, George and Vittorio have together been contemplating the launch of a project called Dante Among Theologians, which would foster deliberate cross-pollination between disparate disciplines and research methods in order to integrate scholarly reflection on Dante, particularly to bring specialists in theology and in literature and Italian studies into one vibrant interdisciplinary space. I am delighted to be joining the efforts of the DCEC here at Notre Dame with their efforts to bring this worthy project to light. In short, our new project, an international consortium on Dante, aims to foster both locally and globally interdisciplinary dialogue involving methods, disciplines, and schools of thought currently engaged in the interpretation of Dante's works and the reception of those works This multi-year initiative will include focused seminars in Rome, London, and South Bend, Indiana, as well as mid and large-size scholarly conferences. The project is meant in part to produce and support scholarly publications, including monographs, collected essays, articles, and translations. And we hope that it will eventually also grow to support annual interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowships, team-taught undergraduate integration courses at Notre Dame and elsewhere, and public outreach events and programs for undergraduates, graduate students, as well as the local community. As we are conceptualizing it currently, the main lines of the scholarly inquiry of Dante among theologians will be grouped according to the following organizational principles. One, reading Dante as a theologian among his own contemporaries like Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas with a variety of methodological approaches. The second is theological reception of Dante over the last seven hundred years. How have theologians or theologically trained scholars historically read Dante? This might include scholastic and neo-scholastic interpretations, lay interpretations, the raft of papal encyclicals which address the con- contributions of Dante, as well as translations, as with the work of my colleague George Corbett, who has just translated to-- Pierre Mandanès' Dante the Theologian. The third category is reading Dante himself as a poet and theologian, a theologian's poet or a poet's theologian, in the style of such contemporary scholars as Vittorio Montemaggi, Denis Turner, Matthew Treherne, and others working in this vein So now that we have laid out this broad landscape of the Dante Among Theologians project, I would love to invite to the podium

The Corbett Translation and Recovering Mandonnet

1 10:22

Dr. George Corbett, who will speak to one such dimension of our work, namely his brand-new translation of Pierre Mandan's Dante the Theologian. Thank you.

Speaker 2 10:41

Thank you, uh, Jenny, and it's, it's wonderful to be here and to be, um, as, as you said, sort of soft launching this, this program together with you all. Um, as Jennifer's just noted, um, in setting out our Dante Among Theologians program of research, we've articulated these three key and interrelated strands: reading Dante as a theologian among his contemporaries, the theological reception of Dante, and then thirdly, reading Dante as a theologian among our contemporaries. In much of my own research, I've adopted the first approach or strand of scholarship. Thus, in my monograph Dante and Epicurus: A Dualistic Vision of Secular and Spiritual Fulfillment, I traced the medieval reception of Epicureanism and situated Dante's own polemical treatment of Epicurus and Epicureanism as the heresy par excellence in the Commedia in relation to his philosophy and theology as a whole. And in my book Dante's Christian Ethics: Purgatory in Its Moral Context, I provided a historical and contextualized account of Dante's ethics with particular reference to the Summa de vitiis et virtutibus of the- the Sum on the Vice and the Virtues of the Dominican William Peraldas 1190 to 1271. Over the past 45 years however, I've shifted the focus of my research to the theological reception of Dante, in other words, the second strand of our Dante Among Theologians research program. And today, as, uh, Jennifer mentioned, I'll give just one example of this ongoing research, speaking with reference to my forthcoming introduction to a new edition and the first English translation of the French Dominican tomist Pierre Mandes' Dante the Theologian of 1935. Mandes' book has intrigued me since my undergraduate years at Cambridge when I read Étienne Gilson's Dante et la philosophie of 1939. Gilson's Dante et la philosophie is, I discovered, a polemical refutation of Mandes' Dante the Theologian. But Whereas Gilson's book was translated by David Moore as Dante the Philosopher in 1946 and remains a staple reference point for students and scholars of Dante, many of you will have read it I'm sure, Mandénet's book, written off by Gilson and never heretofore translated into English, was neglected and largely forgotten. Mandénet's book nevertheless intrigued me. I was intrigued by his thesis that Dante's Beatrice is purely symbolic and not, certainly not, to be identified with Bice Portinari, that little Florentine girl of Boccaccio, let alone with any other woman. But I was also drawn to his profound theological understanding of Dante as a whole. So I'd wanted to translate the book or see it translated for many years, um, but with only a, a reading knowledge of French at best, um, really, um, I felt ill-equipped to do so myself, and many years elapsed before I had the great good fortune to meet, uh, Patricia Kelly, um, an expert not only in French translation but in the very specific French context of early 20th-century theology. So she's the translator of Ressourcement Theology: A Sourcebook, for example, that, that some of you may have come across. So we worked on the translation before and through COVID, um, a- and actually it ended up being pretty much word by word. So during COVID, one of the great pleasures, and I, I know it was a difficult time for, for many of us, but for me, every Thursday afternoon between 4:00 and 6:00, um, for over a year, we had a Zoom meeting together, and we kind of worked our way word by word, honestly, through the text. And she's since become a, a close colleague, and she's now at St. Andrews as a, a- and, and she's a, a friend as well. And we're both delighted that this new edition and the first English translation will come out early next year, 2025, as Dante the Theologian, excuse me, in the Studia Traditionis, uh, Theologiae series with Brepols. We are also extremely grateful that owing to the generous sponsorship of the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and the vision of, um, Jennifer Newsome Martin, this volume will be published open access, um, enabling it the widest possible scholarly impact and readership. So our volume, Dante the Theologian, will be, I hope, the first fruit of many, um, in our collaborative Dante Among Theologians research program. Um, and it will contribute especially and more specifically to our program's second strand, the theological reception of Dante. So why Mandone? Why translate his forgotten work of 1935? This is a question I've been asked a number of times, sometimes, um, insistently, um, by other Dante scholars over the past few years. Um, and in this regard, let me read from the last section of my introduction to Dante the Theologian, which situates the volume's purpose within this potentially broader project of historical retrieval and reappraisal In assessing the contemporary state of Dante studies, Zygmunt Zieranski notes the rise and consolidation of deeply ingrained critical orthodoxies. Dante scholars, he suggests, are rather too cautiously conformist in their opinions, in large part because in order to pursue our own researches, we rely on fundamental fixed points which we treat as somehow objectively legitimate and hence absolute, despite the subjectivity of their origins, and we feel uncomfortable when these are called into doubt, since they are the foundations upon we, which we construct our own proposals. In my view, a constructive way to challenge the hegemony of present day scholarly assumptions is to recover viewpoints in Dante's reception history which cut against and across them. Scholarship is not uniformly linear in progression, and if highly learned scholars of an earlier generation understood central features of Dante's works very differently, this should give us, at the very least, pause for thought. It helps us rega- reflect again on these fundamental fixed points. How did they come about? Can we justify them adequately? To what extent are they matters of historical documentation? To what extent of more or less plausible interpretations? And what happens to our own proposals if the foundations on which they are based start to crack, crumble or even collapse entirely? It's partially then, in this spirit of reopening scholarly debate and dialogue about fundamental features of Dante's works that I've sought to introduce Mandanies Dante The Theologian, mostly written prior to 1922, and thus over a century ago to a wider English language readership. I've signposted three major areas which, in my view, particularly merit reappraisal in contemporary Dante scholarship. First, the appropriate hermeneutical framework for Dante's work. Secondly, the relationship between Dante's and Aquinas' thought. And third, the status of Dante's Beatrice. In each of these areas, Mandanies viewpoint presents a clear challenge to the deeply ingrained critical orthodoxies of today. But Mandone's arguments might also challenge or complement many other contemporary opinions and directions in Dante scholarship. It's striking, for example, that the research questions which underpin Baranski's own seminal contributions to the study of Dante's intellectual formation from the 1990s on is where did Dante go to school and what were the educational institutions of late 13th century Florence are the very same questions Mandone asks in his chapter simply titled Dante's Intellectual Formation. Equally striking though are the radically different conclusions to which Baranski and Mandone arrive sometimes from the same documentary evidence. Most obviously perhaps, Mandone's unabashed presentation of Dante as a theologian is particularly relevant to contemporary Dante scholarship given its theological turn or return in the early 21st century. In part two of his book, Mandone avers that although of course Dante seeks the laurel, the legitimate glory owed to his poetical genius, his aspiration as a Christian moralist prevails over everything else while he's also a born doctrinarian teaching the theology and the profane science which helps serve his theological ends. In taking the epitaph of Giovanni del Virgilio, Dante's contemporary correspondent as the epigraph to his book, Mandone signals the antiquity of this view. Dante is a theologian of extraordinary learning, there being no doctrine in Lady Philosophy's bosom of which he is ignorant. Mandane's historically informed account of Dante the theologian as a preacher, doctrinarian, and distinctively medieval poet, as well as his sophisticated analysis of the theological purpose, method, and content of the Commedia is, in my view, valuable for anyone seeking to understand Dante as well as Dante's reception today. So three core interventions. When I began work on the introduction to the volume, I wanted to situate some of Mandane's key arguments in relation to their own context as well as in relation to contemporary Dante studies. And as I mention again at its close, I settled on three key interventions, the appropriate hermeneutical frame, the relationship between Dante and Aquinas' thought, and Dante's Beatrice, each of which clearly challenge a contemporary consensus. So first, the great Dante scholar Robert Hollander celebrated, thank you, as a defining achievement of 20th century Dante studies the freeing of readers from, in his words, "The interpretative shackles imposed by forcing the allegory of the poets onto the poem," an approach which he underlines had been its fate from the time of the early commentators. Hollander goes on to claim that the allegory of the comedy is not the allegory as the commentators urge me to apply it. I may read this poem as history and understand it better. So I was highly skeptical of this achievement of 20th century Dante scholarship, and I disagreed with Hollander's claim following Singleton that the Commedia should be read according to the allegory of the theologians. And Mandane provides not only an argument against such a reading, but a highly sophisticated hermeneutical approach to the Commedia as a whole. As a second point, in the 21st century and surveying the status questionis, John Tooke concluded that perhaps the single most impor- important accomplishment of 20th century Dante scholarship, and certainly in the area of philosophy and theology, was the separating out of Dantean and Thomist spirituality. Well before the end of the century then, the myth of Dante's Thomism has been put to rest. Again, through my own historical research, I was becoming ever more suspicious of this scholarly consensus and its ideological motivations, and Mandone's sophisticated arguments for Dante's Thomism provide again a way to challenge it. And on the seventh centenary of Beatrice's death in 1990, Ignazio Baldelli was able to state confidently that the absolute non-historicity of Beatrice is an abandoned thesis. In my view, however, it was worth recovering this abandoned thesis and challenging the realist scholarly consensus about Beatrice, namely that she was a real woman, Bici Portinari, who came to image forth or symbolise Christian theology, et al., which had settled in 20th century scholarship post-war. Mandone's purely symbolic interpretation of 1935 is arguably indeed its last stand. Now, I'd intended to write no more than 5,000 words on each of these three interventions as part of a 15,000 word or so introduction. However, in researching them, each was so rich and fascinated that I ended up writing three extremely long articles on these three interventions. All three are, after much cutting, I promise, just under 20,000 words including footnotes. But if you're interested in these three revisionary reappraisals and their context, I've given the references in the handout. And as they're all published open access as well, I'm able to simply reference them in my revised introduction, thus keeping it to a much more manageable size and not dwarfing Mandone's books as under 10,000 words. Okay. So Pierre Mandone and the Leonine Renaissance of Catholic Dante Scholarship. In the introduction, I also situate Mandone's work on Dante within his scholarship as a whole, as well as in relation to prevailing currents of Dante scholarship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pierre Mandone, 1858 to 1936, came to Dante as an outstanding medieval historian. Having entered the Dominican Order in 1883, aged 25, Mandone was professor of church history at the University of Freiburg from 1891 to 1918, where he also held the roles of rector and dean of the Faculty of Theology. On his retirement, he continued to research and teach at Le Saulchois, the Dominican House of Studies for the French province in Belgium until his death in 1936. Yeah, yeah. He's best known for his two-volume study of Siege of Brabant, his research on St. Dominic, revised after his death in two volumes, and his work on Aquinas having collaborated on the critical edition of Aquinas' works commissioned by Pope Leo XIII. In his day indeed, Mandet was one of the giants of medieval studies, the Dominican master par excellence of the historical method, whose name became synonymous with fundamental research into the thought and writing of Thomas Aquinas. Mandet's interest in Dante though was also scholarly and lifelong, the fruit of some 55 years of reflection as he states in his own introduction. As his confrere Marie Humbert Fiquet comments, Mandet's book is strengthened by a rather long intimacy and a very thorough survey of Alighieri's text, which he investigated very deeply, such that we can see the real genius of this historian in the way he treats Dante according to his thought, method, life, and technique, all of which are influenced by his background. Mandone's approach to Dante strongly parallels that of Joachim Joseph Bertier 1848 to 1924, his Dominican colleague at Freiburg 10 years his senior. Also an accomplished medieval historian, Bertier published important works on the early masters of the Dominican order, and he also collaborated on the Leonine edition of Aquinas' works, as well as publishing a series of Thomist scholastic manuals. Bertier translated Dante's Commedia into French, an edition used by Mandone, and he also published a two-volume edition of The Inferno in Italian with scholastic commentary in 1892, as well as a series of articles on the poet. Bertier and Mandone, the Dominican Bertier and Mandone's labors testified then to a new Catholic impulsion to Dante studies symbolically given papal approval by the removal of Dante's Monarchia from the index in 1881, where it had been, um, since 1554, um, and which paralleled the Renaissance into mystic studies instigated of course by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris in 1879. This Catholic impulsion, which arguably reached its apogee in Pope Benedict XV 1921 encyclical Impreclara Sumorum, the only encyclical, uh, on a poet, emerged in reaction to late romantic and predominantly secular approaches to Dante. While the papal Dominican Cordovani and the Jesuit scholar Busnelli lamented in 1921 the widespread ignorance of the Catholic faith and her theology amongst both students and professors of Dante leading to erroneous expressions and false concepts, Mandone, like other Catholic scholars of his generation, sought to use the historical and scientific method and his deep knowledge of theology to aid in the proper exposition of Dante's works.

Hermeneutics and the Allegory Debate

Speaker 2 28:27

So let me finally say something about just one of the three interventions where I think that Mandone's scholarship is so important, understanding the appropriate hermeneutical frame for the Commedia. As T.S. Eliot wrote, "Dante is the poet of the imagination." And hermeneutic seems to me especially important if we're to understand what Dante meant by his unprecedented imagined division of the three realms of the medieval afterlife in the Commedia. In his scholastic commentary to the Inferno, Joachim Berti explicitly parallels 19th century interpretive approaches to Dante's Commedia with their literalism and overemphasis on the narrative surface of the poem to the exclusion of allegory to contemporaneous historical critical approaches to the Bible with their almost exclusive focus on the literal historical sense of scripture and dismissal of the mystical senses. Such Dante scholars, he says, are like the laici, the laypeople of Dante's time, who simply interpret his poems as about sensual love or his Commedia as about the regions of the afterlife. They even suppose he went there. Whereas for the learned, this is obviously an allegory, the fiction, and not the meaning of the allegory, which lies hidden beneath its veil. For Mandonnet, such scholars have imposed the flaying of Marsyas on Dante, leaving one in an effect with an ornamental bedside rug, a lion skin, rather than a great living organism, the lion itself. In part three of Dante the Theologian, Mandonnet seeks to recover, therefore, the great living organism of Dante's Commedia, setting out a highly sophisticated account of his poetic technique and consequently of the appropriate framework for his poem's interpretation. Mandonnet pays attention both to the marvelous verisimilitude realism and human particularities of the literal sense, understood nonetheless as a beautiful lie, and to the doctrine, especially moral and theological, which it covers and hides. For Mandane though, Dante is not just a poet who treats theology, but who treats, treats theology through theology, through a properly theological technique. He first charts Dante's development of the 12 literary modes of theology, his theological use of symbolism for different purposes, including to manifest and to hide doctrine, his deployment of the four senses of scripture, and his conforming of the Commedia to the Trinitarian rule of one in threeness. He then surveys the whole poem as a sacred drama, analyzing in turn the script, stage, actors, action, and audience in terms of their surface and allegorical meanings. In other words, Mandane presents an account of Dante's hermeneutics as at the most fundamental level according to the allegory of the poets. But at the same time, Mandane greatly enriches this interpretive account by showing how Dante as a poet draws on properly theological techniques. By contrast, Charles Singleton argued that Dante wrote according to the allegory of the theologians and not the allegory of the poets. A consequent precondition for Dante's reader is an imaginative ascent to the truth of the poem's literal sense. The literal story of Dante's journey through the afterlife should be read as if it were true, or in Singleton's famous and confusing phrase, "The fiction of the comedy is that it is not a fiction." If Mandane's account of Dante's poetic technique is fundamentally right, this highly influential scholarly trajectory is fundamentally wrong, and vice versa. A reappraisal of Mandane's approach is particularly instructive in my view as a foil for the Singleton school of reading the Commedia according to the allegory of the theologian. Mandane's analysis of Dante's adoption of the symbolic method and polysemous signification in the Commedia enables us indeed to situate Singleton's contribution more accurately. This was Singleton's novel insistence that Dante thereby implies that the literal sense of his poem must be read as if it were true. The assumptions underpinning Singleton's conviction are just this however, and betray a typically Protestant understanding of the literal sense of scripture and an apparent unawareness of the crucial distinction in medieval biblical hermeneutics between direct and indirect signification. Where Singleton, Hollander, and many others associate the literal sense of scripture exclusively with the historical passages of the Bible and conclude that as a result, Dante's seven-day visit to the afterworld is to be treated as historical fact. Mandane applies the scriptural procedure of indirect literal signification and the distinction between the letter and the sense of the symbol to the distinction between the literal and symbolic senses of Dante's Commedia. Like the letter of the symbol in scriptural interpretation, as for example when scripture speaks of the arm of God, the literal sense of Dante's Commedia is a figure and is in a strict sense instrumental, whereas the symbolic or allegorical sense of the poem, like the sense of the symbol and scriptural interpretation as in that example, God's operative power is the intended meaning. A correct understanding of Dante's poetic procedure and therefore of the appropriate interpretive approach is a foundational precondition for a correct understanding of his poetic works. Notably, some of the most vexed 20th century discussions of the theological content of the Commedia have been underpinned by the questionable insistence on the literal truth claim of the poem. The hermeneutic strategy to interpret certain features of the Commedia, whether it be a region such as the Limbo of the Virtuous Pagans or a character such as Beatrice, solely according to the allegorical sense is in continuity with the allegory of the poet's approach of Dante's early commentators. But it is ruled out if one equates the truth of the poem as resting primarily and at all times on its literal sense. A further, more general import of the literalist interpretation of the Commedia is that it contributes to a wider secularizing approach to Dante. The location of the poem's theological truth primarily in its literal historical sense creates an implicit separation and alienation between Dante and what he is presumed to have believed or to have asked us to believe, and his readers and what they are presumed to deem credible. For Mandone, as for Berthier, what is signified through the beautiful lie of Dante's fiction is in large part simply Catholic doctrine. Whether or not the modern reader assents to one of these doctrines will depend on the nature of their own philosophical convictions and the nature of their Christian faith or lack of it. But neither Christian believer nor unbeliever needs to ascribe to Dante the implausible belief that his poem records a true mystical vision or that Dante wanted us to read the Commedia like scripture as if it were literally true. Where Hollander encouraged students that the allegory of the comedy is not the allegory as the commentators urge me to apply it, I may read the poem as history and understand it better therefore. Mandone might encourage a future generation of students that the allegory of the comedy is the allegory as the commentators urge me to apply it. I may read this poem as theology while appreciating ever more fully Dante's poetic art, his profound empathy with the lives of specific historical individuals and his mastery of verisimilitude and understand it better. And crucially, if they do so, they will be adopting a hermeneutic approach much more in continuity with the 700-year-long commentary tradition on the poem as a whole than the literalist approaches favored by the majority of scholars over the past hundred years. So I hope that just gives you one glimpse, one example of how a study of the theological reception of Dante, here a retrieval of the theologian Mandone's understanding of Dante's hermeneutics in the early 20th century, might help us to challenge prevailing scholarly views as well as to understand better Dante's poem today. Thank you.

Speaker 4 37:28

Thank you, George, for that wonderful

Speaker 3 37:30

contribution.

Salvation, the Gospels, and Method

Speaker 3 37:31

Thank you everyone for being here. It's, it's a joy to be here. Um, thank you to the Ni- the, the De Nicola Center. Thank you to the Catholic Imagination Conference. Thank you to Jenny, um, for the introduction, but also for bringing this project together in this way. Thanks also to Ted Cacci, the head of Italian studies here, here at Notre Dame, who's, um, in Italy at the moment, so can't be with us today, but who, who has also helped us bring this project to where we are, where we are today. My comments will be mainly on the third strand of the project as defined, um, earlier. I'll be raising one particular example, and I'll be doing something that, as my friends and colleagues, um, will know is relatively rare. I'll be, uh, actually be speaking relatively little about Dante. Um, I'll be trying to contextualize thinking about just one line in, in Dante and one word in particular. Um, just to give you a sense of the kind of difference that approaching Dante in the kind of spirit of this project can, can make. So this is work in progress for me in terms of my own research, but I do think that these are questions that are larger than any single scholar can, uh, address and questions that, um, uh, welcome a collective approach and indeed need, um, a collective approach. So, as I said, I'll just be referring to one passage from the comedy. That's towards the end of my remarks. To get there, I'm gonna refer to four passages from the Gospels and three passages from contemporary theology, um, as a way of setting the scene, uh, for thinking about some methodological questions as to how we interpret, um, Dante's, Dante's poem. Dante's comedy is widely regarded as one of the most detailed, vivid, and structured attempts at representing a Christian afterlife. But what did Dante actually think about salvation? I think this is a question we don't ask ourselves quite often enough. In addressing this question, I do think we still collectively have a lot of work to do. Um, and we need to explore dimensions of Dante's poem that are not often taken into account. We don't have time this afternoon to do all of that work, but I just wanted to suggest, um, and, and, and provoke some questions for us. Generally speaking, we tend to think we know what Dante means by hell, purgatory, and paradise, the three realms of the afterlife that he visits in the journey he describes in the comedy. There might be differences of opinion, um, regarding exactly how to interpret the different levels and aspects of the three otherworldly realms that Dante represents in the comedy. There might also be differences of opinion regarding the extent to which Dante might have thought it possible to represent the afterlife. But there does tend to be a general, usually unspoken agreement on at least four things. First, there seems to be agreement that in the comedy, what Dante wishes to present to his readers is the opportunity to reflect on the afterlife intended as the state of the human being beyond death. This is a relatively uncontroversial statement. Second, there seems to be agreement that Dante's idea of the afterlife is characterized by a separation between damnation and salvation, also relatively uncontroversial. Third, there seems to be agreement that a human being's state is fixed for eternity one way or the other at the time of death, either damned or saved. Purgatory does add complexity to this picture insofar it is a, as it is a postmortem temporal state towards eternal beatitude, but it is generally seen to coincide from the perspective of eternity with salvation The fourth point of general agreement is that in presenting us the states of damnation and salvation, Dante wishes to present us not just with a reflection on these states in the abstract, but as an essential part of his work with particular examples of human beings who are either damned or saved. So it is the third and the fourth levels of this general agreement, um, that I wish to address. In particular, I hope that my comments might help us bring to Dante's poetry a more lively kind of questioning, um, and perhaps, um, reconsider the general assumption that as presented by Dante, the state of damnation is fixed at death and is necessarily eternal. And if not to question, at least to qualify the assumption that Dante primarily wished is to present us in a descriptive way with examples of human beings who are either damned or saved. Before turning to the one example from Dante's comedy that I mentioned earlier, I would like briefly to refer to four passages from, from the Gospels. This is to provide a set of perspectives that might help us engage with the comedy so as to address the kind of methodological questions that I was, that I was just referring to. Taken together, these texts from the Gospels seem in themselves to invite us to reconsider some of the basic assumptions that are normally brought to reading Dante's comedy. My point, however, in referring to these passages, um, is not to suggest that these are direct sources for Dante's work or that D- Dante necessarily had these in mind when reflecting on the question of salvation. My point more simply is to highlight that from a theological point of view, even brief engagement with some key passages of the Gospels, uh, suggests that, uh, we need to refine some of the assumptions we normally bring to interpretation of Dante's text relative to the question of salvation. The first text is Luke 6:37, uh, "Do not judge, and you will not be judge, judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven." We often think of the comedy as an exercise in judgment on Dante's part, damning or saving others from the perspective of eternity. A short but significant text from Luke would clearly seem to suggest that to read the comedy as a form of judgment in the sense of condemnation would be to read it at odds with a fundamental aspect of Christian teaching. That in itself is not necessary to say that that is not how Dante intends us to read his work. At the very least, however, it should bring us to exercise more caution than we normally do in reading the comedy as judgment. Indeed, in the comedy, Dante himself highlights, especially in Inferno 20 and Paradiso 20, that human beings are not able to see into divine judgment. What are the implications for this, of this for interpreting what Dante is doing in the comedy? A significant clue, I think, is given i-in the passage, uh, from Luke. A reading of the comedy could be enriched if we see the text not so much as a form of judgment, but as an expe-- uh, as an exploration of forgiveness. I'm very happy to talk about that later in the Q&A as well. The second, um, text from the Gospels I'd like to refer to is Matthew 16:18 to 23. "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give thee the keys to, of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, "God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen to you." But he turned and said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things, but on human things." These, uh, this text from Matthew also invites caution in thinking about the human ability to judge. In the very passage in which, in which Christ entrusts the church to Peter, Peter is strongly revealed as fallible, unable to recognize Christ. The language adopted by Jesus in, in pointing out such failure would seem to associate Peter more with hell than with heaven. And yet the passage opens with a firm reassurance, which is not in itself then contradicted in the text, that it is on Peter that the church will be built, and that it is Peter who will hold the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. If even Peter, to whom the keys, keys of the Kingdom of Heaven are entrusted, is shown as unable to judge divine affairs correctly, on what grounds could other human beings presume able to be able to do so? Again, this is not in itself to show that Dante did not presume in his way. Dante himself tells us he was, he was rather proud and presumptuous, so it, it's possible that this is what he was thinking. But again, the passage does suggest that we should exercise more caution than we normally do in simply assuming that judging divine affairs is ultimately what Dante is attempting to perform in the comedy. A clue to what the broader implications might be of this for reading the comedy, again, we can, we can, uh, look at the passage itself. The gates of Hades will not prevail against the church. Shaky as its foundations might appear to be in the figure of Peter, Christ's words offer the church assurance that ultimately hell cannot prevail on it. It is extremely interesting to try and relate this to the comedy. If, at least only for argument's sake, we grant that the comedy might not ultimately be about judgment, could we also say that it is a text wishing to invite us to reconsider from the perspective of salvation, the very notion of hell? A notion that Dante's poem might otherwise seem so rigidly and compellingly to endorse. So open-ended questions that I hope can give you a sense of just how much work perhaps we still have to do in thinking theologically about Dante. Two passages from the Gospel of John provide some, perhaps some initials suggest- suggestions as to how we might approach, uh, these, this, this, this reconsideration. In John 3:17, Christ himself as incarnate God is strongly associated with salvation as opposed to condemnation. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Then in John 10:9, Christ speaks of himself as a gate. "I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture." I'd like to suggest that the way in which Jesus here speaks of himself as gate offers an important clue as to how Dante might be inviting us to reconsider hell in the comedy. In particular, these passages from the Gospel of John can help us put into perspective the gates of Dante's hell. Spoiler alert, that's the, uh, that's the passage from which the line I'm gonna refer to at the end is gonna be taken. These passages from the Gospel of John can help us put into perspective the gates of Dante's hell in Inferno and Inferno Three by suggesting that it is legitimate to expect that a Christian poet like Dante, whose work is centered on the incarnation and on the mystery of salvation, is or at least ought, ought ultimately to be more interested not in judging others to eternal damnation, but in reflecting on Christ as eternal gateway to salvation and on how his poetry can help highlight that direction of travel, as it were. We'll return to this when we, when, when we think about Inferno, Adita and Inferno Three in just a little while. But before turning to the text of the comedy, I'd like to offer some other theological considerations, um, with the help of some contemporary theologians to further contextualize this approach to Dante's text

Hell and the Question of Hope

Speaker 3 49:54

First, um, reference to the recent work on universal salvation by David Bentley Hart He presents a challenge for interpretations of the comedy. He critiques the work of theologians, and I'll give you an example in just a second. He critiques the work of theologians who wish to interpret Dante's hell not as divinely imposed punishment, but as the result of the free choice of sinners. I'm quoting from Bentley Hart. Divine mercy has provided an arena of moral freedom, so the story goes, one in which every fallen soul can become fully what it has chosen to be. And so there really is a logic of love at work here, a kind of divine magnanimity. The soul that prefers having hell to surrendering to God's love receives the hell it has asked for. At least, that is the way a good many theologians insist on describing the first third of the comedy. For his part, at least, Dante gives no indication of seeing the matter in this way at all. Yes, perhaps the various torments described in the poem are in some way self-induced, but they nevertheless reflect an especially vindictive kind of proportional logic and are, by virtue of their eternity, infinitely disproportionate to any finite deed. For Dante's God, if one is more or less emotionally intact, one can feel only a kind of remote loathing. And frankly, neither the Purgatorio nor the Paradiso quite succeed at erasing that impression. So quite a sharp critique on Hart's part of Dante. But I think it is significant that Dante is brought into this significant work of theology approaching this very important question today. So Hart's critique is a powerful one. According to Hart, Dante's comedy ultimately fails theologically to recognize divine love as fully as it might. Even theological interpretations of the poem that see Dante's hell not as divine vengefulness but as a condition freely chosen by the human beings who inhabit it cannot ultimately undermine a divinely sanctioned vengeful system whereby it would appear in the Inferno that sinners suffer disproportionately and for eternity. I think Hart is certainly right in highlighting severe moral and theological limitations in Dante's text, especially in its apparent propensity to depict and therefore at least for poetic purposes to consign fellow human beings to eternal suffering. However, his brisk and brusque reading of Dante's text seems to display towards Dante Dante's Yeah, uh, his reading of Dante's text seems to display towards Dante, Dante's God and theologians, um, who interpret Dante's comedy too quick a judgment, and his interp- and his interpretation of the text remains relatively superficial. In particular, Hart seems to take for granted that Dante's purposes in depicting the afterlife in the comedy are primarily descriptive, and he does not seem to take into account those aspects of the poem that might actually be, in certain respects, more consonant with notions of universal salvation, um, that his work compellingly argues for. If we look more closely at some theological, uh, interpretations of the comedy, including some of the kind referred to by, by Hart, and then engage in some more detail with the text of the comedy, we can recognize, I think, in the latter theological perspectives strikingly at odds both with Hart's critique and with prominent assumptions we regularly bring to interpretations of Dante's text. Turning now to the work of another contemporary theologian, one of the most compelling readings of Dante's Hell as choice, the position critiqued by Hart, is provided by Dennis Turner in his book, Dante the Theologian. Dante's Hell is not just the place of punishment inhabited by sinners. It is a place where sinners by choice inhabit their sins and live their lives structured by sin's distorted perceptions of love. That love they have to reject as being an invasion of some imagined personal space independent of God as a violation of their personal freedom and autonomy. But the self-deceived self-affirmation shows up in the refusal of the damned to accept that there can be any narrative other than their own, for they deny that there is, after all, any Divina Commedia. The damned all have their own stories to tell, and Inferno tells them. Each of them, from Francesca da Rimini to Ugolino, know that those stories which they each tell of their fates recount not just why they were sent there to Hell in the first place, that is their specific sin, but also why they are held there without term in a condition of sinfulness. For the grip of Hell is but the grip with which they hold onto their stories, without which they cannot imagine for themselves any identity or reality. They need their stories, stories of their own telling, and they need the misrepresentations that those stories tell. Hell is but the condition consequent upon their ultimate refusal to abandon that need. And that raises a question, what if they could? We'll return to that. Hell then is not the condition of those who have sinned, for many who have sinned more grievously than Francesca and Paolo are not in Hell but in a place of redemption in Purgatory. Hell is the condition of those who do not repent of their stories, who refuse the offer of their salvation by the divine love and insist on living by means of the story that sin tells, the story of the attempt to achieve a self-made significance independently of the story of divine love. So the contrast drawn by Turner between our attachment to our self-centered stories and the story of divine love highlights a dimension of Dante's text not captured by Hart. On Turner's view, Dante's depiction of sin does not seem primarily to focus on eschatological status as an objective reality. The comedy is a story about stories of sin told to us, told to us presumably so that hopefully we may become better storytellers ourselves. So there, there's a methodological approach there to Dante's text that shifts the emphasis on what Dante's depict, on what Dante depicts as if it were presented to us as descriptive of reality to an emphasis on how the text can help inner transformation. Turning to the third, uh, theologian I'd like to, um, bring to our conversation, Cyril O'Regan's interpretation of the comedy can help us reflect further on one of these crucial aspects of Dante's text According to O'Regan, the comedy, quote, "Exceeds magisterial theological production in a number of ways. First, through its descriptive powers and evocative metaphors, La Divina Commedia manages to find an objective correlative to what by definition does not allow one. And by doing so, it offers a motive for transformation that no theological treatise can provide. Second, La Divina Commedia represents a form of double redress. Redress on the one hand to the crude imaginings of the Christian tradition, especially with respect to hell, and on the other, to the discourse of the disembodied soul governed essentially by, um, Platonic-- governed by essentially Platonic protocols. Third, La Divina Commedia represents nothing less than a supplement to scripture, which at the same time does not compete with it." So in, in, in O'Regan's words, we find, uh, thoughts that resonate with, with a number of the questions, uh, uh, that I've been suggesting. By speaking of the poem as offering a motive for transformation, a motive for transformation, and by highlighting in particular its theological sophistication in this respect relative to its literary imagining of hell, O'Regan significantly foregrounds the theological value of the comedy as residing not so much in conceptual elaboration, but in its capacity to engage the imagination and the person as a whole as scripture can. Therefore, to read the comedy as a text intended by Dante to contribute to the salvific w-work of scripture and of the word So, um, how do we bring all of this together, um, in, in relation to Dante's poem? As I said, I'll refer to just one example. I think it's a simple, striking and-- but I think hopefully, uh, uh, an example that can, can encourage further thought and the invitation to, uh, to work collectively towards a deeper understanding of Dante's theology. The, the line I wanna focus on is one of the most famous lines in the comedy, uh, Inferno 3, line 9. Um, usually translated as, "Abandon all hope you who enter here." The last words on the inscrip- inscription on the gates of hell. The reason I hesitated in offering an English translation is that even there in the, in the question of translation lies a potential ambivalence that I think is significant. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate. Almost invariably, these words are interpreted as an imperative, a command. Abandon all hope, you who enter. The Italian is that and also indicative. All you who enter, abandon hope. It's just that's what you do in abandoning i-in entering hell. So hope is not something that you have and are forced to give up because you have to enter hell. Someone has demanded that you enter hell, and therefore you have to abandon hope. You abandon hope, and that's how you enter hell. Um, interestingly, there are examples, one in particular in the comedy, of people who, through the prayers of others especially, do leave hell, regain that hope. Prayers in hope for another's hope. There's a, there's at least one very significant example in the comedy, that of Greg- uh, Pope Gregory's prayers for the Emperor Trajan, that allow someone to, um, uh, leave hell insofar as they regain hope. So the hope, prayers in hope for the hope of others seem in the comedy significantly to be presented as somehow stronger than hell. Stronger certainly than the assumption we usually bring to Dante's text about damnation as an eternal condition, or at least our assumptions that a human text like Dante can have somehow a divine force setting damnation for eternity. We could speak more about this and, and then re-reflect on how Dante integrates this kind of perspective, perhaps with a self-critique as a poet who writes hell. By the end of the Inferno, I think there's good argument to make that Dante can be shown to be r-very self-critical. Yes, I am des-describing hell. I think by doing so, I can provide a motive for transformation, but it's also perilous business because by doing that, not only do I give you the impression that I'm damning others, but I might actually start believing what I'm doing. And, uh, Dante does seem to call himself into ques-question in that way. Anyway, so that's just one example, but I hope that presented in the context of, of reflections, uh, such as the ones I've offered, suggest that really we do have a lot more work to do, and hopefully this project can, can help us do that. Thank you.

Q&A and Closing

1 1:02:42

Thank you so much to, um, our presenters. Uh, we have about 12 minutes for questions if anyone has any burning questions. I have a single question that hopefully will be simple to answer as people are, are gathering their thoughts. I wonder what you might say, Vittorio, about the status of Virgil. You know, we, we who live... What is the line? We live in a longing. We have no hope, and yet we live in longing, right? So, um, you know, is, is Virgil... I, I would just love to hear what you think, uh, a-about that question

Speaker 3 1:03:23

Thank you. Is this on? Can you hear me? Yeah. Um, the, the short answer there I think is that, um, Virgil as presented in the comedy is a more complex character with respect to the question of salvation than we have, um, uh, so far noticed or worked on, and maybe this is one, one of the other things that our project can help us do. Um, I think there is enough textual evidence to suggest that there's something that the figure of Virgil is presented in the comedy as developing throughout his journey. Um, Father Chase Pepper, I, I think was here has, has, has had to leave but I remember in, in, in a class a long time ago he asked, um, "Well, if, if, if Virgil journeys in the realm of salvation, he goes to purgatory as well. Can we reasonably from a theological point of view imagine that he remains unaffected? Can someone journey in the realm of salvation itself and remain unaffected?" And I think there's evidence in the text that suggests that Virgil is not unaffected. For one thing, he learns to smile and smiles are very significant in Dante's poem and we can have a whole other session about that and a whole other session about Virgil. But I do think that when Virgil leaves we tend to assume well of course he goes back to hell. I think that's too rigid an assumption. I wouldn't go as far as to say that he's definitely saved and that's I think part of the point. Salvation ultimately for Dante is a mystery and perhaps the invitation there if as a character you felt that Virgil's, um, eternal fate is, uh, unfair or if you feel that he's th-- does develop and deserves a little more, I think he, he's almost there as a literary encouragement motive for transformation. What are we gonna do about it? Would, would we want to pray in hope for the hope of others with respect to Virgil? Now here we enter into questions about fiction. I think I agree with George that Dante doesn't necessarily want us to read his poem as history in that sense. But I do think the figure of Virgil is there to invite us to think that we are not separate from the mystery of salvation. We cannot grasp it, but we can pray. Yeah

Speaker 5 1:05:50

Okay, let's, uh, hear from our audience. Thank you

Speaker 6 1:05:55

Thanks. Um, hello, George. This is a, a kind of complex comment that I'd like to have you comment back on. So your, uh, discussion of Mandonnet and particularly that last thesis which you spent some time on, the non-historicity of, of, uh, Beatrice, right? So you prompted me to think about why would he advance that thesis at that time, writing his book when he started, right, when Europe is engulfed and France in the Great War, and then publishing it when Italian, the, the, the Italian Republic is going into fascism, right? So to think about the arc of time here, right? So you have... And then you cited Leo XIII and, and creating the Dante chair and the Angelicum and everything, right? Why would he do that, right? Because Dante had been claimed already by the Risorgimento as a secular poet, right? And so the, um... And it's a movement away from the church. The, the Pope, they, they've lost everything, right? They've lost the control and the influence over the Italian people of to whom Dante belongs, that the Italian Republic, the non-theological public, the anti-church has claimed Dante. So what's the brilliant move? Well, you take the monarch off the, off the prohibited books. You start studying Dante as a theologian that transcends politics, right? Um, and then you have people like our Father John Zahm here at Notre Dame running around collecting Dante books to turn to create Dan, uh, Notre Dame is a great Catholic university built on his Dante collection So, Mandonnet is not Italian. He doesn't really have a stake in the outcome of Italian politics. He's French, right? But going through the same travail here, it seems to me that it works better for a Catholic theologian to insist on the historicity of, of Beatrice as a body and bodies in the Commedia, and Dante himself as a body, because that's the sacramentality, the materiality of the sacramentality, the materiality, right? And so you can get from Singleton, you can go to Mazzolta, and you can get a theologian that way, or you can flip it around and get Barolini to do the Undivine Comedy by still keeping a phenomenological materiality. But it's all on that historicity of, of Beatrice. And maybe that's one reason why the modern era has focused so much on that. So the comment and the question coming back to you is, it seems to me that it works better actually for Mandonnet to, in his time, to insist upon the non-historicity because history is a disaster for, for Mandonnet and the Dominicans and, and everything. If you try to take Dante through history to get to theology, it doesn't work, okay? But if you take theology out of history and you make Dante to be, you know, the, uh, champion of Aquinas and the, uh, perennial theology, it works better to have, um, a, uh, Beatrice not be a historical figure, right? Isn't that why he would do it? That's a challenge to you. Sorry. That's a complex comment, but I'd really be curious for your thoughts on that.

Speaker 4 1:08:55

No. Um, yeah, that's, that's my simple answer. Um, uh, okay. Um- I

Speaker 2 1:09:08

mean, first of all, almost all the material, um, that was published i-in 1935, um, was drawn up for the anniversary in 1921, so it's an earlier period. Um, second, um, the political environment is in- incredibly important, but in Mandet's case, as you, you allude to, it, it's more about the, the, the state of the French state. I mean, remember even when he goes to Le Chau- Le Chauvoir, the reason they're in Belgium is because the religious orders have been banned from France. So it's more about that kind of, um, um, immediate political, um, context. Um, uh, certainly Étienne Gilson wants to, um, uh... I mean, I, I have this whole long article, uh, Beatrice is Not a Woman: Symbolic and Realist Interpretations of Dante's Beatrice in the 1930s, where I kind of situate it. But one thing I would like to emphasize is that Gilson, in his book, uh, makes it out that, um, Mandet is this bizarre cleric who is the first person ever to have truly understood Dante's Beatrice, um, and he's come up with this crazy theory that she's purely symbolic. And that, like a lot, I'm afraid, of what Étienne Gilson says, is, is untrue. Um, Gilson really does present his opponent's arguments in- incredibly unfairly. And one of the interesting things, I mean, my whole research project at the moment funded by the British Academy is about the historical reception of Dante's Beatrice. And, um, in the late 19th century, there were far more people who thought she was purely symbolic than who, who were realists. So it's, it really is a contemporary consensus. Um, and, um, uh, and in terms of, you know, you, you talking about, you know, the Catholic ones, was more Catholic to say she's sacramental. I mean, that's, there's lots, you know, I could argue about that a lot. Um, and I mean, I've got... I've just written a very long argument on Balthasar's interpretation of Dante. I mean, for, for Balthasar, Dante's done something entirely unprecedented in the whole history of Christian theology. That is to say, he has reconciled eros and agape through Beatrice, right? That's what, um, Ba- Balthasar thinks, right? Well, that's true if Dante intended Beatrice to be, uh, you know, had a historical person. It's complete nonsense if he didn't. So there's a lot hangs on that, that premise. Um, uh, but I mean, that's a short, short response.

Speaker 4 1:11:37

Great. Yeah. Thank you. Send more of them. Okay.

Speaker 5 1:11:43

It looks like we may have time for one more question, so whomever

Speaker 7 1:11:49

Thank you all so much. That was excellent. Um, so there are many ways in which approaching Dante as a theologian would be incredibly productive. Um, however, I'm a literature scholar, so I have my biases. Um, there's a way in which you can't really abstract ideas from the text, right? Um, and Dante's poetics are so integral to his ideas that I see some maybe methodological dangers here. Um, so in what way could Dante's poetics actually inform understanding Dante as a theologian, like the way the poetry itself is functioning? And also, do you see any, um, sort of methodological pitfalls in approaching Dante as a theologian?

Speaker 3 1:12:31

S-- um, so yes, there are pitfalls. Uh, one I think you very, uh, appropriately referred to, and thank you for doing that, and that is the moment we think of Dante's text simply as something we can take ideas out of, we've gone too far. So thank you for stating that clearly because I think that is, that is a pitfall. It is a, it is a pitfall that we have fallen in, and so it's something we need to be aware of. Um, one example to, um, to continue with the conversation about Virgil perhaps, um, but not only Virgil, Be-Beatrice as well, is the smile. So, uh, an-another great, um, scholar working on Dante's theology who's o-opened the way for a number of others, Peter Hawkins, refers to the smile in the comedy as Dante's signature and most important contribution to Christian theology. Now, y-you can't have the smile if not in, in, in poetry in a way, and so you can't really abstract that out of the text. So that's just one example that I would, that, that I would give, but certainly, uh, we could talk more and think of others. But, but yeah. Thank you.

1 1:13:40

And I think, um, Vittorio mentioned Dennis Turner's book, Dante the Theologian, um, which I think makes a very strong claim in its opening salvo that Dante is a theologian insofar as he is a poet, right? I mean, so it's, it's very much the kind of like embodied flesh of the word and the form of the word it-- that makes him a theologian. So, um, otherwise, I think it would be, um, not only bad poetry but also bad theology just to abstract. Um, so thank you all for coming. It's a real joy to see you, and, uh, we'll, we'll see you onward and upward. Thanks, everybody.