Openness to Reality

Dante viewed Christianity in terms of an adventure unknown to the contemporary world. To the poet, it was not a doctrine nor even an event that happened two thousand years ago, but something that happens in the present and reaches man through faces and words

BY ANTONIO SOCCI

There is a beautiful tercet in the Divine Comedy describing the instant of the Annunciation as the moment in which Heaven finally opens and rains onto the world a peace unknown to human history, which until then had been a horrendous slaughter: “L’angel che venne in terra col decreto/ de la molt’anni lagrimata pace,/ ch’aperse il ciel del suo lungo divieto…” [“The angel who came to earth with the decree/ of the peace wept over for many years,/ which opened heaven of its long ban”] (notice in the original Italian the series of accents in the second line, all on the “ah” sound, ending finally with “pace,” which gives the musical sensation of rest and trustful yielding).

This is the Christian announcement, the news of an event, of the birth of the Son of God. But Christianity, for Dante, is not only the announcement of an historical fact that happened 2,000 years ago; for him, it is something that happens in the present that reaches man through real faces and words and eyes and fills him with wonder. This comes out clearly in the passage from the Divine Comedy in which Dante finally meets Beatrice and encounters her eyes (Purgatory XXXI). Dante represents man who has lost his way, who has sunk down into the darkness of a hunted and distressful existence without meaning, even though he was a fourteenth-century Florentine, and thus a Christian. His desperation, the desperation of the dark woods, was therefore a post-Christian, not pre-Christian desperation, the desperation of a man who “knew” Christianity and its dogmas and everything else, and despite this had ended up in a desperate state. Perhaps it was even more terrible because the goodness and beauty of a past history, of having “seen,” of having been a Christian, did not save him from the dizzying bewilderment of the present, and this produces a much greater desperation than that experienced by those who have never known Christ.

Human chain
Thus, he is a man lost and frightened by life, until he is reached and seized in that dark woods by an unexpected encounter, and through this man by a sort of “human chain” that proposes to him to “go on another journey” and takes him by the hand, accompanying him with fatherly affection to face head-on the evil into which he had sunk–and then to lift his eyes and heart toward salvation.

When Dante, on the summit of Purgatory, is handed over to Beatrice–whose intercession resulted in the “human chain” that has reached him–and looks into her eyes, we find an enigmatic passage that it seems has never been given an exhaustive explanation by Dante scholars. This is the point where Dante says he is filled with wonder at what he sees in Beatrice’s eyes. We shall talk about this later. But first I would like to say that we should reflect at length on the unsatisfactory commentary on certain passages (such as this one) of the Comedy. Generally, when someone does not know how to throw light on the obscure points of Dante’s poem, he ends up resorting to far-out or esoteric hypotheses. Lately, Dante has even been turned into a Muslim (and before that into an “initiate,” even a Templar and much more). The only idea that is not considered is that he was a Christian, and that this is where an explanation of some of his “obscure” lines must be sought.

A discarded hypothesis
In a word, everything is attempted, but excluding from the outset or drastically underestimating the most rational and philologically correct hypothesis: Christianity. All this happens because–as is typical of modern culture–Christianity is filed away in the dusty library of the “already known.” People think they already know what it is and, sure of knowing all about it, they exclude that it might contain the answers for understanding Dante. Indeed, it is presumed–even more incorrectly–that, for Dante and the Christians of the fourteenth century, Christianity corresponds to the (absurd, banal, unbearable) idea that the average man of today has of it, especially the intellectual, who in fact knows nothing about Christianity. Despite his infinite presumptuousness, he does not even know what is being talked about when the word “Christianity”–what Péguy called “that marvelous device”–is mentioned.

In reality, a little bit of intellectual honesty, a little bit of philological correctness would be enough to understand that Dante speaks about Christianity in terms of an adventure unknown to our contemporaries. In his Letter to Cangrande, for example, he writes explicitly that his poem (or in other words, the Christian adventure) has as its goal to “take those living in this life out of their state of misery and lead them to the state of happiness.” In this life, to happiness. And “for what are revolutions carried out if not for happiness?” questions Pier Paolo Pasolini. What incites all human agitation if not the desire for happiness?

Practical end
And yet it is precisely this that is the challenge of Dante’s poem. “It does not have a speculative, but a practical aim,” Dante himself emphasizes in the above-mentioned Letter to Cangrande. But people have not understood this; they have not wanted to understand. A claim like this would be enough for understanding that with Dante’s Christianity we are face to face with something unthinkable and today unknown. Only great philologists like Erich Auerbach have intuited it and have set themselves to industriously looking into the misunderstood Christian tradition to find an explanation for this marvelous, grand masterpiece by Dante.

Another important philologist, Paul Zumthor, has formulated a valuable warning: “One thing leaps immediately to our eye: the distance separating us from the Middle Ages, the irremediable distance… The history of its economy, institutions, and ideas enables us to reconstruct the general background of reference in which the particular content of each text is placed; this content remains to us, as such, inaccessible by this path… medieval poetry belongs to a universe that has become foreign to us; a rupture separates us from it, which it is better to consider an unbridgeable abyss than to pretend to ignore.” This is a crucial observation that should advise the reader who today ventures to follow the pilgrim Dante to do so in an attitude of humility and curiosity, of unprejudiced openness, as one should assume when facing a totally unknown world. This is necessary also because The Divine Comedy is a very special case. For Dante demands even a concrete (“practical”) willingness to take a certain journey, the journey Dante took, thus a personal experience of conversion. Without this, he makes us understand, the hermeneutic horizon of the poem eludes us. This is a unique case in the history of literature: it is a book that the reader has to enter as a second protagonist. It is one in which the main protagonist even speaks to him as though he were present, right there beside him. There are twenty or so passages in the Comedy where Dante interrupts his story and turns to the reader to “ask him to share the poet’s experiences and feelings.” This is unprecedented and is, Auerbach notes, “a ‘new’ relationship between reader and poet.” For example, “the attempt has been made to interpret the apostrophe ‘O you who are in a little boat…’ as an appeal addressed to real traveling companions, not the readers of a book.”

Indeed, Dante declares it openly, right at the edge of Paradise, at the beginning of his experience of grace: “Going beyond humanity cannot be put into words; the example may suffice for those to whom grace reserves the experience.” He means to say that there are no words capable of narrating the experience of grace that exalts humanity, but whoever has the same experience will understand what he is about to tell.

Thomism in verse
Whatever can he be talking about? All scholars think they “know” perfectly, they know how to recite all the definitions of Thomist theology and they lead one to believe that the Comedy, in the final analysis, is nothing more than Thomism set to verse. But Dante himself clarifies the matter, at the summit of Purgatory in a great scene dominated by the figure of the gryphon, which is half eagle and half lion. All the commentators explain–rightly–that this is a metaphor for the two natures of Jesus Christ, true man and true God.

It happens that Dante “saw Beatrice turned toward the beast that is one sole person in two natures.” And here something extraordinary happens. Dante, looking directly at the gryphon, sees his two natures, just as they appear in the Church’s dogmatic definition. That is, he sees the doctrine of the Church. But looking into Beatrice’s eyes, Dante realizes that something stupefying is happening, for in his image reflected in those eyes, the gryphon shows first one and then the other of his natures.

This is the scene that the commentators cannot manage to explain in its profound meaning but which, conversely, appears clear to anyone who has the experience of Christianity. For it reaches a man of the fourteenth century or of the third millennium not only as a series of doctrinal definitions safeguarded and handed down by the Church, not only as doctrine, but as a beloved face (Beatrice) through whose eyes the exceptional humanity of Christ reaches one directly and this experience is the evidence of His full divinity. This is exactly what happened to John and Andrew, and then to Simon Peter, Philip, and the others.

And this appears to be what Dante wants to communicate and what modern culture does not want to understand, i.e., that Christianity is not (only) a doctrinal definition, nor is it (only) an event of 2,000 years ago, but it is today the encounter with an exceptional humanity in which one literally experiences the divine, the divinity of Christ. “Just think, reader, how I marveled,” Dante remarks, faced with what he saw in Beatrice’s eyes. “Full of wonder, my joyous soul was tasting of the food that, while it satisfies, yet makes one hungrier for it.”