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Towards an existential interpretation of the Divine Comedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
The Commedia is not just an aesthetic, but an existential, work. As such, it demands an interpretation which relates it not merely to art and art-history but to our own human concerns, to our situation and existence in life, to life and life-history. That is the note which I wish to strike in this essay, and with this emphasis: the Comedy demands such interpretations; its demand is an integral part of its art.
Of course, though the point is often ignored or forgotten, it is not strictly an original one. Already in the Letter to Can Grande the note is struck, either by Dante or on his behalf, when, having affirmed that the poem has to do with ethics, the Letter goes on to say that its aim is not merely instruction but inculcation. In the previous paragraph it is struck more forcibly still: the work is intended to be nothing less than a means of grace, to produce nothing less than ‘conversion’: ‘Finis totius et partis est removere viventes in hac vita de statu miserie et perducere ad statum felicitatis’ (§ 15). The words are ambitious indeed, and it is hard, at first, to take them more seriously than we are generally wont to take the high-minded professions of moral purpose which conventionally preface a great part of the Renaissance’s literary output. But we should, I think, make the attempt, and test them, to see if, at least in a part—since the whole cannot be studied in an article—the Comedy will substantiate them. We shall try to see how, in spite of the fact that its narrative is compounded of events and phenomena which are miraculous, or fantastic, the Commedia is a communication paradoxically spoken from and to ‘existence’ much as we know it, by an art which, at times, comes close to defining itself as something perhaps quite unique: the art of converting through art, ‘de statu miserie ... ad statum felicitatis.’
1 ‘The aim of the whole work and each part of it is to guide those who are actually alive away from misery and towards happiness’.
2 U. Foscolo, Discorso sul testo della Commedia di Dante, Genoa 1930, p. 101.
3 F. De Sanctis, Lezioni e Saggi su Dante, Turin 1955, p. 640.
4 B. Croce, La Poesia di Dante, 2nd ed., Bari, 1921, p. 76.
5 ‘When I heard my Master name the knights and ladies of old times, pity seized me, I was as one lost and bewildered’.
6 ‘For pity I swooned as if dying, and fell as a dead body falls’.
7 ‘O Living creature gracious and kindly, who came through the dark air to visit us who stained the world with blood, if the King of the universe were our friend we would pray him to grant you peace; since you feel distress at our dreadful plight’.
8 ‘Love that swiftly seizes on noble hearts’. The line is obviously intended to recall Guinizelli's poem Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore, and Dante's awn sonnet Amore e il cor gentil sono una cosa.
9 ‘Alas, how many sweet thoughts, how much desire brought them to the woeful pass’.
10 B. Nardi, Dante e la cultura medievale, Bari 1942, p. 82.
11 ‘Love… spares no one who is loved from loving’.
12 The reader of blackfriars will recognize my debt to R. Poole and his article, ‘Dante's Indirection’ (April, 1963, No. 514, pp. 164–1771). Though I am independent of his arguments and differ in my conclusions, I must acknowledge, with gratitude, the stimulus which Mr Poole has given to my thought in this essay by his original suggestion of the relation between Dante and the categories of Kierkegaard.
13 N. Sapegno, comment to Inferno V. 100 in his one volume edition of the Divina Commedia, Milan 1957, p. 64.
14 loc cit.
15 The distinction is expressed by saying that the structure, the analysis, or the characterizing of human existence is ‘existenzial’ whde ‘existenziell’‘is a speaking and listening in terms of one's own concrete concerns’ (G. Bornkamm in Kerygma and History ed. by C. E. Braaten and R. A. Harrisde, p. 174n.).
16 Barlow Lectures on Dante (1959), Supplement to Italian Studies, p. 14.
17 Ibid, p. 15.
18 Quoted by I. Brandeis, The Ladder of Vision, London, 1960, p. 23.
19 See Par. xvii. 124–32, which shows that Dante consciously intends to alter his reader through the poem, to offend in order to eddy.
20 The Point of View for my Work as an Author, p. 13.
21 i.e. from foolish objectivity, cf. again the Letter to Can Grade, $16.
22 Ibid, pp. 41–2
23 Petri Allegherii Commentarium (Florence 1845), p. 25. ‘By this means he gives us, in his own person, moral instruction, showing how we ought to open the eyes of our mind to see where we are, whether we are on the right road… or not’.
24 Cf. Benvenuto da Imola, Comentum, Florence 1887, I, p. 16: ‘Quaedam enim anima est posita in peccatis, et ista dum vivit cum corpore, est mortua moraliter, et sic est in Inferno morali’. It is in the context of this theology, surely, that the Comedy should be seen: here its critical task of evoking repentance is urgent indeed, and the centrality of its aim to teach us, as Pietro (quoted above) says, ‘aperire oculos mentis ad videndum ubi sumus’ in this light becomes clear.
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