*Article* **Mathematics, Mystery, and Memento Mori: Teaching Humanist Theology in Dante's** *Commedia*

#### **Sean Gordon Lewis**

Department of English, Mount St. Mary's University, Emmitsburg, MD 21727, USA; slewis@msmary.edu

Received: 22 February 2019; Accepted: 21 March 2019; Published: 26 March 2019

**Abstract:** Undergraduate students in the United States of America are increasingly less religious, and this decline in religiosity is felt not only at secular colleges and universities, but also at those with a religious affiliation. This article seeks to answer the question of how one can effectively teach the Christian vision in Dante's *Commedia* to undergraduates who have little or no religious formation. The methods I have used to teach freshmen in core Humanities courses have differed somewhat from the methods I have used to teach upperclassmen in Literature electives. For the freshmen, focusing on what I call "humanist theology" has been successful, allowing them to see that the Christianity found in Dante's epic is not merely a list of rules, but a way of viewing human life that is consonant with their own experiences. *Purgatorio* is the most important canticle for this method, and the case of Virgil's damnation is a vital topic. For upperclassmen, finding analogies to Christian Mystery in the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and creative writing has proven fruitful. The main conclusion of this study is that these techniques are useful in presenting Dante's work to non-religious students without sacrificing the epic's specifically Christian content.

**Keywords:** Dante; *The Divine Comedy*; Christian Humanism; The Christian Intellectual Tradition; Literature Pedagogy

#### **1. Introduction**

If high school students or undergraduates have read any portion of Dante's *Commedia*, it is almost certainly his *Inferno*. There are good reasons for this fact. The canticle begins the epic, depicts physical struggle and moral growth, and (most importantly for younger readers) has enough gory *contrapassos* to qualify as horror fiction. Reading only *Inferno*, however, always seemed to me to be a disservice both to students and to Dante's epic vision. This opinion has only become more solidified as I have continued to see the undergraduate classroom populated by students whose religious formation is slim to nonexistent. "Nones"—young people who do not identify with any religion—are a fast-growing demographic in America. Smith and Snell's vital work on young adult religion and spirituality indicates that only 5% of American youth are religiously "devoted" (attending weekly services; praying often), and that only 14.3% fall into the "regular" category (regular, but not weekly, attendance of religious services; prayer less important in daily life) (Smith and Snell 2009, p. 259).1 Their research thus indicates that religious faith plays little to no role in the lives of over 80% of "emerging adults" (people in their teens and twenties). Traditional undergraduate students are exactly this demographic. Religiously-affiliated universities have student bodies that are perhaps atypical because of self-selection, but studies of faith-based higher education have concluded that this is generally not the case (Marsden 1994; Morey and Piderit 2006). As these demographic trends continue, the professor at a Catholic or Christian school cannot rely on basic religious literacy in many students.

<sup>1</sup> See particularly Chapter 5, "The Cultural Structures in Emerging Adult Religion," which is quite a telling chapter for the future of faith in the United States.

Given these trends, I had to consider carefully what image of God and Christianity one gets from *Inferno* alone. The answer is likely a version of what non-Christians and inadequately catechized Christians already think: the Christian God is at best a rigid authoritarian ("follow my rules or else be tortured forever in Hell"). The Gates of Hell say that *Love* made them, which appears to add insult to injury.<sup>2</sup> At worst, God becomes a sadistic bully, damning souls who simply had the misfortune to commit a single sin, single sins that do not seem wrong to most 21st-century students. Undergraduate students are more apt to look at Pietro della Vigna's suicide (*Inferno* 13) and Brunetto Latini's homosexuality (*Inferno* 15) with pity and understanding, further solidifying for many students the notion that Christian theology is inhuman and outdated. As someone interested in both the fullness of the Christian tradition and the richness of Dante's theological imagination, I find that teaching *Inferno* alone creates more problems than it solves.

The question, then, is how to do justice to the complexity of Dante's theological epic with students who, by and large, lack the necessary background to appreciate it. At Mount St. Mary's University, I have taught Dante's *Commedia* every Spring as part of a required Freshman Humanities survey on the Classical and Christian Imagination. I have also taught the entire work (in translation) in an English elective on the Epic. My experiences of teaching Dante to these two different populations—general population freshmen who are required to be in my course, and upperclassmen (largely English majors) who elected to take my course—have led me to think that the path to guiding non-religious students to appreciate Dante's epic must be found in the heart of the work, *Purgatorio*. It is in this second canticle that the reader sees even more clearly the nature of sin and virtue, and, more importantly, how Dante begins to complicate the rules of the afterlife through the question of salvation for noble pagans, a particularly troubling case for the character of Virgil. In this essay, I will share some of the strategies I have found useful for helping general population underclassmen to see that Dante's Christian vision is actually more nuanced than they might have thought, and more relevant to their own lives. My challenge with non-religious upperclassmen was a bit different, since the most troubling canticle for them was *Paradiso*. In their case, I had to justify a poem written about a non-human subject: heavenly realities that we cannot "know," and that even Christians must admit are mysterious.3 For these upperclassmen, contemporary poems about mathematics and science proved to be apt analogies to begin, at least, to carve out a place for metaphysical poetics in their understanding of literature. In both cases, I found that a kind of "Humanist Theology"—meditating on mysteries that are evident simply to reason and lived human experience, apart from revelation—was a key concept to meet them where they were and help them appreciate and understand better Dante's achievement as one of the major poets of the Christian Intellectual Tradition. This kind of theology does not seek to replace traditional Christian theology, but it is complementary to it. If our hearts are restless until they rest in God (as Augustine says in the first book of his *Confessions*), if God has written the Law on the hearts of the gentiles (Romans 2:15), then ordinary human life, without reference to systematic theology, points in the direction of the Christian mysteries at the center of Dante's epic.

#### **2. Dante's** *Purgatorio***: An Education in Mercy**

I will begin with teaching *Purgatorio* to underclassmen, since I have done so much more frequently, and because this freshman introduction to Dante seems to me to be far more vital: the more freshmen

<sup>2</sup> "Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore:/Facemi la Divina Podestate,/La Somma Sapienza e 'l Primo Amore"; "Justice cause my High Architect to move:/Divine Omnipotence created me,/The Highest Wisdom, and the Primal Love" (*Inferno* 3.4-6). Anthony Esolen's translations will be used throughout this essay (Alighieri, Dante. 2002. *Inferno*. Edited and Translated by Anthony Esolen. New York: The Modern Library; Alighieri, Dante. 2003. *Purgatory*. Edited and Translated by Anthony Esolen. New York: The Modern Library; Alighieri, Dante. 2004. *Paradise*. Edited and Translated by Anthony Esolen. New York: The Modern Library). Esolen's notes are scholarly enough for introducing students to the work, and they take Christianity seriously, a great resource for introducing students to the Christian Intellectual Tradition.

<sup>3</sup> 1 Corinthians 2:9: "What eye has not seen, and hear has not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him" (*New American Bible, Revised Edition*).

who realize that the *Commedia* is a deep work that has continued relevance, even apart from its faith content, the better! In the first place, I should note that I do not teach *Purgatorio* entirely without context. I have my students read the first few cantos of *Inferno* to orient themselves to the work, followed by a brief summary of the canticle. Each semester I also tend to have a few students who have read *Inferno* in high school, but have never read *Purgatorio*. I can thus very quickly get the class to understand the basic premise of the economy of salvation and damnation: sin turns a person away from God and neighbor, and thus is a damnable offense. My religious students without much formation formulate Dante's world in a typical Pelagian fashion: do good, and go to heaven; do evil, and go to hell. So far, so good. But what about a person who has sinned greatly, profoundly, but who repents at the last second? This tit for tat economy of salvation would seem to rule against such persons. This is why Antepurgatory is a vital place in the epic to begin questioning the simple (and technically heretical!) notion that good deeds earn salvation. Such a multitude of damned souls crosses into *Inferno* that one might well ask how *anyone* could be saved.4 When students get to Manfred (*Purgatorio* 3) and Buonconte da Montefeltro (*Purgatorio* 5), however, matters become more complicated. Manfred, the son of Emperor Frederick II, died excommunicated from the Church, a fate that one might think would damn him. While he recognizes his sins, his words speak of the immense Mercy shown to souls in Antepurgatory: "My sins were horrible,/but endless grace/has arms of generous goodness thrown so wide/they take in all who turn to them ... no man so loses, by their curse's power,/eternal love, that cannot return/so long as hope shows any green in flower" (*Purgatorio* 3.121-23, 133–35).<sup>5</sup> Buonconte, the sinful son of the damned friar Guido da Montefeltro (*Inferno* 27), recounts a particularly vivid example of this kind of hope: his last-minute conversion on the battlefield:

. . . below the Casentino Rushes a stream, the Archiano, born In the Apennines above the Hermitage. Just where it empties and its name turns vain I arrived with an arrow in my throat, Fleeing afoot and spattering the plain. And there at once my sight and speech were gone. I ended with 'Maria' on my lips And fell, and left my flesh to lie alone. It's truth I tell—tell it to all alive! God's angel took me, and the one from Hell Hollered, 'O you from Heaven, why deprive Me of his soul? He sheds one little tear And you bear his immortal part away!' (*Purgatorio* 5.94-107)6

If a single, sincere prayer while dying—whispering the name of the Mother of God as one bleeds out from a neck wound—is enough to save a person, then the question is changed: why isn't *everyone* on the road to heaven? The Mercy of God found in Antepurgatory is profound, grace operating beyond natural justice. Here I can introduce students to the picture of a God Who is Mercy Itself. Recall that the angel at the gates of Purgatory proper is charged by St. Peter to let in too many, rather than too few:

<sup>4</sup> "E dietro le venìa sì lunga tratta/di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto/che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta"; "And all behind that flag in a long file/so numerous a host of people ran,/I had not thought death had unmade so many" (*Inferno* 3.55-57).

<sup>5</sup> "Orribil furon li peccati miei;/ma la bontà infinita ha sì gran braccia,/che prende ciò che si rivolge a lei ... Per lor maladizion sì non si perde,/che non possa tornar, l'etterno amore,/mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde" (*Purgatorio* 3.121-23, pp. 133–35).

<sup>6</sup> "A piè del Casentino/traversa un'acqua c'ha nome l'Archiano,/che sovra l'ermo nasce in Apennino./Là 've 'l vocabol suo diventa vano,/arriva' io forato ne la gola,/fuggendo a piede e sanguinando il piano./Quivi perdei la vista e la parola;/nel nome di Maria fini', e quivi/caddi, e rimase la mia carne sola./Io dirò vero, e tu 'l ridì tra' vivi:/l'angel di Dio mi prese, e quel d'inferno/gridava: 'O tu del ciel, perché mi privi?/Tu te ne porti di costui l'etterno/per una lagrimetta che 'l mi toglie" (*Purgatorio* 5.94-107)

"Peter's they [the keys] are, who said that I should err/rather in opening than in keeping shut,/so long as men should kneel before my feet" (*Purgatorio* 9.127-29).7 Whether students believe in Purgatory as an actual part of their religious faith, in the world of the *Commedia* Purgatory itself is a sign of God's mercy: even if you threw your whole life away in vice, a little ray of hope is enough to put you on the road to heaven. The damned lack this hope (cf. the Gates of Hell: "abandon all hope, you who enter here"; *lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate*, *Inferno* 3.9). Apparently, even the smallest bit of this virtue is enough to be saved in the world of the *Commedia*.

This image of divinity leads naturally to questions about how we imagine ourselves living our lives. Even without a more specialized, Thomistic knowledge of virtue and vice, every person can consider this question: are there things that I do, ways I that live my life, that are unhealthy or counterproductive? Do I wish that I lived differently in certain aspects of my life? This way of phrasing these questions sounds similar to those found in "self-help" books, a genre with which the average undergraduate is likely familiar. If young adults begin to see Dante's *Purgatorio* as focused on self-improvement, washing the grime away from the faces of the repentant so that their true selves can shine through, this presents them with a far more positive picture than that of a distant God who damns people for breaking rules: "My master gently ran his open hands/over the little tufts of grass, and I,/who understood the reason for his art,/Presented him my cheeks, still stained and teared./He wiped them, and at last discovered all/the color that the smoke of Hell had bleared" (*Purgatorio* 1.124-29).<sup>8</sup> In reality, every soul in the *Commedia* is where she or he is by choice: the choice to be the best version of themselves or the choice to be something else.<sup>9</sup> Put in those human terms, which are not terribly far, I think, from the text's own vision, the paradox of God's infinite Justice and infinite Mercy becomes a bit clearer for most underclassmen.

#### **3. Free Will and Love: The Center of the** *Commedia*

I also highlight the vital importance of the center of Dante's *Commedia* to emphasize how the notions of free will and love give rise to the work's entire economy of salvation. Like any liberally-educated medieval person, Dante appreciated mathematics, and attending to number in the *Commedia* yields much fruit. *Purgatorio* and *Paradiso* each have 33 cantos (a number with obvious Trinitarian overtones), while *Inferno* breaks this perfection with 34. That extra canto, however, means that the *Commedia's* 100 cantos can be neatly divided into two sets of 50: *Purgatorio* 16 is the last canto of the first 50, while *Purgatorio* 17 is the first canto of the last 50. I impress on students that authors, particularly authors of Dante's skill, do not write works haphazardly, and *Purgatorio* 16 and 17 can easily be seen as the "thumbnail" version of the argument of the work as a whole: that humans have free will, that God loves each human soul, and that every action, both good and evil, is caused by love.

In *Purgatorio* 16, Dante gives one of the most important speeches in the *Commedia* to Marco the Lombard, a man caught in the smoke of the circle of the wrathful. Dante the Pilgrim questions Marco on the cause of sin and evil: "but pray, show me the cause of all this sin,/that I may see it and reveal it, for/some blame the stars, some fortune here below" (*Purgatorio* 16.61-63).10 Marco answers him in one of the most beautiful and significant passages of the epic:

<sup>7</sup> "Da Pier le [le chiavi] tengo; e dissemi ch'i' erri/anzi ad aprir ch'a tenerla serrata,/pur che la gente a' piedi mi s'atterri" (*Purgatorio* 9.127-29).

<sup>8</sup> "Ambo le mani in su l'erbetta sparte/soavemente 'l mio maestro pose:/ond' io, che fui accorto di sua arte,/porsi ver' lui le guance lagrimose;/ivi mi fece tutto discoverto/quel color che l'inferno mi nascose" (*Purgatorio* 1.124-29).

<sup>9</sup> The damned in *Inferno* have a telling habit of blaming everyone but themselves for their current predicament. Consider Francesca early on in the canticle: "Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse!"; "A pandar was that author, and his book!" (*Inferno* 5.137; NB: Esolen makes reference to Pandarus from the English literary tradition to approximate the semiotic function of Galeotto in the Italian literary tradition). According to Francesca, she and Paolo are not to blame for their lust: the Arthurian romance bears all the fault, which rings rather hollow.

<sup>10</sup> "Ma priego che m'addite la cagione,/sì ch'i' la veggie e ch'i' la mostri altrui;/ché nel cielo uno, e un qua giù la pone," (*Purgatorio* 16.61-63).

. . . "My brother," he began, "the world is blind, and it has been your home. You living men attribute to the sky The causes of all things, as if they moved Ever and only by necessity. That would destroy the freedom of your will, Nor would it then be just to deal out joy For doing well, or woe for doing ill. The heavens give your movements their first nudge— Not all your movements, but let's grant that too— Still, light is given that you may freely judge And choose the good or evil; and should free will Grow weary in the first battles with the stars, Foster it well and it will win the day. You men lie subject to that One who made You free, a greater force, a better nature, Who formed your minds without the planets' aid. Thus if this present world has gone askew, Look to yourselves, in yourselves lies the cause" (*Purgatorio* 16.65-83).11

This speech not only solidifies the logic of Christian economy for students; it further shows application to their own lives. How much do we imagine that we are in control of our own lives? In place of divine determinism, consider biological or sociological determinism: I ask my students to what extent their genes, their upbringings, their homes have now determined, for the rest of their lives, the choices they will make. Fairly quickly conversation reveals that while they think that these externals matter to varying degrees, even biology, psychology, and sociology majors want to say that they do have at least *some* freedom of choice, and they often point to case studies of exceptional individuals who rise above the bad hand dealt them by fate (they all read Frederick Douglass in our core curriculum). Dante calls us to responsibility and action, not blaming our problems solely on others. Bad leadership *is* a problem (*Purgatorio* 16.97-105), and there are limits to what an individual can do to change the community. At the same time, the individual can do *something* to face the evil in the world; as Marco notes, if there is evil, then the cause is in *us*. The call to action to realize that we are connected to and complicit in societal evils and the exhortation to choose to live differently resonate with students of diverse backgrounds, and are keys to understanding the *Commedia* as a whole.12

Turning to *Purgatorio* 17, we find Virgil's masterful discourse on love, which explains much of the epic's economy of salvation, but also raises further problems:

Not the Creator nor a single creature, As you know, ever existed without love,

<sup>11</sup> " ... e poi cominciò: 'Frate,/lo mondo è cieco, e tu vien ben da lui./Voi che vivete ogne cagion recate/pur suso al cielo, pur come se tutto/movesse seco di necessitate./Se così fosse, in voi fora distrutto/libero arbitrio, e non fora giustizia/per ben letizia, e per male aver lutto./Lo cielo i vostri movimenti inizia;/non dico tutti, ma, posto ch'i' 'l dica,/lume v'è dato a bene e a malizia,/e libero voler; che, se fatica/ne le prime battaglie col ciel dura,/poi vince tutto, se ben si notrica./A maggior forza e a miglior natura/liberi soggiacete; e quella cria/la mente in voi, che 'l ciel non ha in sua cura./Però, se 'l mondo presente disvia,/in voi è la cagione, in voi si cheggia" (*Purgatorio* 16.65-83).

<sup>12</sup> It is also worth noting the image of the soul and the origin of evil in this canto: "Directly from His hand who cherished her/before she came to be, the simple soul/comes forth just like a little baby girl/Who cries and laughs and doesn't know a thing/save that, moved by her Maker, by her joy,/she willingly turns to all that makes her sing./Innocently she tastes the savor of/some lesser good, then chases it, deceived,/unless some rein or guide direct the love"; "Esce di mano a lui che la vagheggia/prima che sia, a guisa di fanciulla/che piangendo e ridendo pargoleggia,/l'anima semplicetta che sa nulla, /salvo che, mossa da lieto fattore,/volontier torna a ciò che la trastulla./Di picciol bene in pria sente sapore;/quivi s'inganna, e dietro ad esso corre,/se guida o fren non torce suo amore" (*Purgatorio* 16.85-93). This image of the beautiful, beloved soul falling through childish ignorance harmonizes nicely with Virgil's treatment of love in the next canto.

The soul's love or the love that comes by nature. The natural love is just and cannot rove. The soul's love strays if it desires what's wrong Or loves with too much strength, or not enough. When towards its prime good it is led aright And keeps good measure in the second goods, It cannot be the cause of bad delight, But when it twists to evil, or does not Race for a good with the appropriate care, The Potter finds rebellion in the pot. Hence you can understand how love must be The seedbed where all virtuous deeds must grow, With every act that warrants punishment (*Purgatorio* 17.91-105).13

Particularly by this point in the epic, students are primed to recognize the truth in Virgil's words, and can supply their own examples. Do they have a friend or roommate in a dysfunctional romantic relationship? Of course they do! Do they love Netflix more than studying for a math exam? Of course they do! It does not take Christian faith to recognize the truth of ordered and disordered loves, and the prerogative to attempt to love well. But this very fact puts front and center another problem students often have with Dante's epic: the damnation of Virgil.

#### **4. Virgil's Damnation and the Mystery of Salvation**

*Purgatorio* does not make Virgil's damnation easy for the reader. Granted, Limbo is a naturally pleasant place in which one can discuss philosophy and poetry for all eternity, but that technicality becomes much harder to bear as readers grow ever fonder of Virgil. They see Virgil relate to Dante more as a loving mentor in *Purgatorio* than as the stern father he sometimes was in *Inferno*. Particularly when students meet Cato and Statius in *Purgatorio*, they find Virgil's damnation much more problematic. Cato was republican pagan suicide who is apparently going to heaven; allegorical readings aside, if he can be on the way to heaven, why not Virgil?14 Moreover, even though Statius was a Christian when living, Statius's conversion story raises *pathos* for Virgil's plight. The ultimate "fanboy" (as many of my students call him), Statius praises Virgil for Virgil's central role in his conversion:

. . . "You were the one," Said he, "who first invited me to sip Of the springs in the grottoes on Parnassus; And then you lighted me the way to God. You did as one upon the road at night Who holds a torch that those behind may see, Though he himself's unaided by the light, Saying, 'From Heaven descends a newborn son;

<sup>13</sup> "Né creator né creatura mai,"/cominciò el, "figliuol, fu sanza amore,/o naturale o d'animo; e tu 'l sai./Lo natural è sempre sanza errore,/ma l'altro puote errar per malo obietto/o per troppo o per poco di vigore./Mentre ch'elli è nel primo ben diretto,/e ne' secondi sé stesso misura,/esser non può cagion di mal diletto;/ma quando al mal si torce, o con più cura/o con men che non dee corre nel bene,/contra 'l fattore adovra sua fattura./Quinci comprender puoi ch'esser convene/amor sementa in voi d'ogne virtute/e d'ogne operazion che merta pene" (*Purgatorio* 17.91-105).

<sup>14</sup> As an examplary lover of liberty, Cato is certainly suitable allegorically as a gatekeeper for Purgatory. Dante, however, was clearly not a republican (consider his identification of Christ with Roman imperialism; heaven is "quella Roma onde Cristo è romano"; "that Rome where Christ is Roman," *Purgatorio* 32.102). Suicide is a damnable offense in medieval Christian theology (consider *Inferno* 13). Nevertheless, this republican suicide is going to heaven on the literal level of the text, a level that no medieval exegete could forget. Cato's ultimate fate depends on one's reading of *Purgatorio* 1.73-76: "You [Cato] know it—for you did not find it bitter/to die for liberty in Utica,/where you sloughed off the garment that will shine/So bright on the great day"; "Tu 'l sai, ché non ti fu per lei amara/in Utica la morte, ove lasciasti/la vesta ch'al gran dì sarà sì chiara." References to a clear body at the last judgment convince me that his future salvation is assured by the text.

The morning of humanity returns, And a new age of justice has begun.' A poet you made me, and a Christian too" (*Purgatorio* 22.63-73).15

Dante's Virgil was as perfect as a human being could be without divine revelation, and his writings actually inspired people to become Christians.<sup>16</sup> In a theologically-curious passage, Virgil also demonstrates that the damned in Limbo can *love* the living; he says to Statius: "If virtue kindles love,/it kindles love in the beloved too,/provided that love's flames can be observed. Thus from the day when Juvenal came down/to dwell with us upon the rim of Hell/and your affection was made known to me,/My well-wishing for you was such as no/man ever felt for one he'd never seen" (*Purgatorio* 22.10-17).<sup>17</sup> The ability to love others is not typically a characteristic that Christians associate with the damned. If all this is the case, why is Virgil doomed to return to Hell?

Dante the Poet cultivates the reader's attachment to Virgil to the very end, with Virgil's poignant last words and his shocking absence. Virgil's final words to Dante the Pilgrim make reference to Dante's initial subjection of his will in *Inferno* 2,18 indicating that Virgil's guidance has come to completion: "The temporal and eternal fires, my son,/you have now seen, and you have reached a part/where I discern no further on my own./I've led you here by strength of mind, and art; take your own pleasure for your leader now ... . No longer wait for what I do or say./Your judgment now is free and whole and true;/to fail to follow its will would be to stray./Lord of yourself I crown and miter you" (*Purgatorio* 27.127-31, 139–42).<sup>19</sup> While Virgil has no more words in the *Commedia*, his continued presence through *Purgatorio* 28-30 lulls readers into a false sense that he will remain indefinitely. I often need to direct students to take notice of Virgil's departure, coming, as it does, right before the climax of *Purgatorio*, the entrance of Beatrice:

I turned left—as a little child will do Wide-eyed and running over to his mama When he's afraid of something or he's hurt, To say to Virgil, "Not a drop of blood Runs in my veins that isn't trembling now! I know the traces of the ancient flame—" But Virgil had deprived us of his light, Virgil the sweetest father, Virgil, he In whom I trusted that I might be healed, Nor all the world our mother Eve once lost Could keep my cheeks that had been cleansed with dew From darkening again with bitter tears (*Purgatorio* 30.43-54).20

<sup>15</sup> Ed elli a lui: "Tu prima m'inviasti verso Parnaso a ber ne le sue grotte,/e prima appresso Dio m'alluminasti./Facesti come quei che va di notte,/che porta il lume dietro e sé non giova,/ma dopo sé fa le persone dotte,/quando dicesti: 'Secol si rinova; /torna giustizia e primo tempo umano,/e progenie scende da ciel nova.'/Per te poeta fui, per te christiano" (*Purgatorio* 22.63-73).

<sup>16</sup> Christians throughout the middle ages considered Virgil's Fourth Eclogue to contain a Messianic prophecy in the exact place cited by Statius. For a classic treatment, see Ella Bourne, "The Messianic Prophecy in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue" (Bourne 1916); for a more recent treatment of this messianic reading in art, see L.B.T. Houghton, "Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the Visual Arts" (Houghton 2015).

<sup>17</sup> "Amore,/acceso di virtu, sempre alstro accese,/pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore;/onde da l'orca che tra noi dicese/nel limbo de lo 'nferno Giovenale,/che la tua affezion mi fé palese,/mia benvoglienza inverso te fu quale/più strinse mai di non vista persona" (*Purgatorio* 22.10-17).

<sup>18</sup> "Go, for we now share one will alone:/you are my guide, my teacher, and my lord"; "Or va, ch'un sol volere è d'ambedue:/tu duca, tu segnore e tu maestro" (*Inferno* 2.139-40).

<sup>19</sup> "Il temporal foco e l'etterno/veduto hai, figlio; e se' venuto in parte/dov'io per me più oltre non discerno./Tratto t'ho qui con ingegno e con arte;/lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce ... . Non aspetar mio dir più né mio cenno;/libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio,/e fallo fora non fare a suo senno;/per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio" (*Purgatorio* 27.127-31, 139–42).

<sup>20</sup> "Volsimi a la sinistra col respitto /col quale il fantolin corre a la mamma/quando ha paura o quando elli è afflitto,/per dicere a Virgilio: 'Men che dramma/di sangue m'è rimaso che non tremi:/conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma'./Ma Virgilio

Even in the presence of his Lady, Dante the Pilgrim weeps over Virgil's sudden absence, marring the countenance that Virgil himself cleansed back in the first canto of *Purgatorio*. I ask my students whether they were satisfied with Virgil's departure, and most of them are not. For a character as good as Virgil, they find it odd that he just slips away without another word. I point out to them, however, that this is actually quite realistic. What if the last words your best friend said to you are the last words she or he will *ever* say to you? What if the last time you met *is* the last time? I can say with 100% certainty that everyone in my classroom will die at some point in time, and while we live as though we will never die (a phenomenon that a Christian may use to suggest the reality of life eternal), we all *know* that at some point this life will end. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing when exactly that will be. This mediation—again on a very human mystery—tends to lead to excellent conversation, which ties back to the question of how we live. How might we live differently if we were aware of the fact, the *fact*, that we are not sure whether or not we have seen our friends and family for the last time? That is a lesson that Virgil can teach to anyone.

It does not, however, deal with the problem of Virgil's damnation, since many of my keener students note that Marco Lombard's speech raises a troubling problem: if free will is so important, how can God hold Virgil responsible for something that was completely out of his control, the fact that he happened to be a gentile, born before the coming of Christ?21 Answering that question requires me to jump ahead briefly into *Paradiso* to consider the vexing questions raised by the salvation of two different pagans, Trajan and Ripheus. I begin by letting the students know that there *are* pagans in heaven, which initially only infuriates them more: if Trajan and Ripheus, why not Virgil?! My initial response is to return them to considerations of human mystery. Dante is a master at balancing the specific truths known through Christian revelation with the mystery that God transcends any human knowledge or formulation: the "rules" exist, but they also can be transcended, a notion that many find hard to navigate. An apt analogy for students is to consider their own futures. They likely have an idea of what they want to major in and what they want to do after graduation. Let's say that we have Martha, who is majoring in Biology and wants to go to medical school to be an oncologist. That's fantastic, and Martha has good reason, based on what she knows of life at this moment, to imagine that her knowledge of the future is accurate. A bit of reflection, however, reveals that this accurate image of the future is not complete or infallible: what if she finds out that she hates medical school? What if next year she discovers a new passion that she currently does not recognize? What if she finds a career path that did not exist five years ago? This might seem like a tangent, but it actually gets at a vital concept in the Christian tradition: we recognize both that we have accurate knowledge, but that that knowledge is always imperfectly grasping at something mysterious.

Returning to *Paradiso* 19 and 20, the answer to the question of Ripheus and Trajan reinforces the importance of free will, loving community, and the self-recognized limits of Christian teaching. Ripheus is a real conundrum, simply justified through some special grace.<sup>22</sup> In the case of Ripheus, all we can say is that there are simply some mysteries in life. Trajan, however, is a more interesting figure, since his salvation was the result of a pious Christian praying something apparently impossible:

n'avea lasciati scemi/di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,/Virgilio a cui per mia salute die'mi;/né quantunque perdeo l'antica matre,/valse a le guance nette di rugiada/che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre" (*Purgatorio* 30.43-54).

<sup>21</sup> Virgil himself appears to be slightly miffed at the apparent injustice of his situation earlier on in the canticle: "I am Virgil, and this fault alone/has lost me Heaven: I did not have the faith"; "Io son Virgilio; e per null' altro rio/lo ciel perdei che per non aver fé" (*Purgatorio* 7.7-8).

<sup>22</sup> "By grace that showers from a spring so deep/no creature's sight can penetrate into/its first upwelling wave, the other soul/Placed all his love in righteousness below;/for which, grace upon grace, God raised his eye/and showed him our redemption yet to come,/And he believed in it, and from that day/he could not bear the stink of paganism,/and he reproached the people gone awry./Those Ladies were his sponsors at baptism,/the three at the right wheel of the chariot, a thousand years before the Baptist came"; "L'altra, per grazia che da sì profonda/fontana stilla, che mai creatura/non pinse l'occhio infino a la prima onda,/tutto suo amor là giù pose a drittura:/per che, di grazia in grazia, Dio li aperse/l'occhio a la nostra redenzion futura;/ond' ei credette in quella, e non sofferse/da indi il puzzo più del paganesmo;/e riprendiene le genti perverse./Quelle tre donne li fur per battesmo/che tu vedesti da la destra rota,/dinanzi al battezzar più d'un millesmo" (*Paradiso* 20.118-29).

that a dead pagan emperor receive salvation. According to legend, St. Gregory the Great's prayers impelled God to raise Trajan briefly from the dead, enough time to receive baptism:

To flesh and bone The one returned from never-repenting Hell, Of living hope, with power to impel Prayers to God that he might rise once more, And live, and so be moved to willing well. Returned unto his flesh the briefest hour, The glorious spirit I've been speaking of Believe in Him and sought His help and power, And in believing, kindled into love So true, the second time he fell asleep He merited his coming to this joy (*Paradiso* 20.106-17).23

It seems rather odd that prayer can violate the natural order of life and death. But perhaps it should not be so surprising. In the same canto as this account of the salvation of these two noble pagans, the Eagle, made up of the souls of the just in the sphere of Jupiter, has this to say about prayer:

The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence From living hope and burning charity That overcome the will of the divine, Not as a man will overcome a man— The divine wins because it would be won, And won, it wins with its benignity (*Paradiso* 20.94-99).24

This is an astonishing passage. When humans pray to God, God *loves* to have His will overthrown. Particularly for Christian students, this passage is arresting: if we choose to love through prayer, God will change His will. The question of Virgil's status, therefore, becomes not so much why he is in Hell, but why we are not praying for his salvation! According to the *Paradiso*, God is not bound by His own norms, and perhaps we should be more bold in our loving prayers as members of the Communion of Saints. Lest we think too highly of ourselves, though, recall the words the Eagle has for Christians who in their lives are less faithful than such noble pagans: ... Many now cry, 'Christ, Christ!'/Who'll be less near to him on Judgment Day/than will the one who never knew Christ" (*Paradiso* 19.106-08).<sup>25</sup> It appears as though Dante is working towards something that my Catholic students articulate as Baptism by Desire, a concept about which Thomas Aquinas wrote, but which was not official Church doctrine in Dante's lifetime.26 This final piece of the puzzle should leave students, regardless of their faith, with some taste of the complexity of Christian thought, and hopefully an appreciation of its positivity and nuance, seen strictly through a humanist lens.

#### **5.** *Paradiso***: Writing about the Inexpressible**

These sorts of questions and topics can be used for undergraduates at any phase of their development to help reveal the perennial relevance of the *Commedia*, regardless of the reader's faith.

<sup>23</sup> "Ché l'una de lo 'nferno, u' non si riede/già mai a buon voler, tornò a l'ossa;/e ciò di viva spene fu mercede:/di viva spene, che mise la possa/ne' prieghi fatti a Dio per suscitarla,/sì che potesse sua voglia esser mossa./L'anima gloriosa onde si parla,/tornata ne la carne, in che fu poco,/credette in lui che potea aiutarla;/e credendo s'accese in tanto foco/di vero amor, ch'a la morte seconda/fu degna di venire a questo gioco" (*Paradiso* 20.106-17).

<sup>24</sup> "*Regnum coelorum* violenza pate/da caldo amore e da viva speranza,/che vince la divina volontate:/non a guisa che l'omo a l'om sobranza/ma vince lei perché vuole esser vinta,/e, vinta, vince con sua beninanza" (*Paradiso* 20.94-99).

<sup>25</sup> "Molti gridan 'Criso, Cristo!',/che saranno in giudicio assai men *prope/*a lui, che tal che non conosce Cristo" (*Paradiso* 19.106-08).

<sup>26</sup> For a good overview of Catholic doctrine on baptism by desire, see William Fanning's article in *The Catholic Encyclopedia* on Baptism (Fanning 1907).

Before concluding, however, I should also talk about an additional consideration I have when teaching *Paradiso* to upperclassmen. In my experience, *Inferno* and *Purgatorio* are easy "sells" for reasons I have outlined above. *Paradiso*, however, is hard going. As one student put it, the problem is that this canticle is an epic without conflict, and conflict is what makes for good stories (like *Inferno* and *Purgatorio*, which conform to the "hero's journey"). I mused on that excellent observation, and reformulated it this way: the "conflict" in *Paradiso* is the conflict with our own mind and human language to grasp and express mysteries that, by definition, transcend human reason and language. My students were not initially impressed with that formulation: if that is the case, then why is Dante even trying? I pointed out how wildly experimental *Paradiso* is: Dante begins coining new words to try to grasp the realities he is seeing (*transuminar*/transhumanize; *s'addua*/twoed; *s'inluia*/in-Hims; *s'invera*/entruthed;).<sup>27</sup> In that regard, he shows some kinship with James Joyce, a point that some English majors appreciated. At the end of the day, though, Joyce is still writing about observable human reality: why read a work that is trying to express non-observable, inhuman realities?

When confronted with this question, I decided to put Dante aside briefly and consider a sonnet from 1923 by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace, And lay them prone upon the earth and cease To ponder on themselves, the while they stare At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release From dusty bondage into luminous air. O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day, When first the shaft into his vision shone Of light anatomized! Euclid alone Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone (Millay 2002).

This sonnet itself requires some careful analysis and explication. Euclid is studied in one of our Core mathematics courses, but most undergraduates do not appreciate the *beauty* of points, lines, and theorems. I need to gloss a bit: what is a geometrical figure? Something that has no physical reality: no color, texture, smell, or mass. Even the figures are simply visualizations for utterly abstract concepts (as our students discover in Plato's *Republic*). And yet the logic of how axioms build on one another into theorems and proofs is *beautiful*, according to St. Vincent Millay. Pure logic, not bound by earth or language, has a beauty all its own, and this beauty is worthy of being commemorated in a sonnet. Moreover, continuing on my mathematical riff, I note that we *know* that there are such things as irrational numbers. *Phi*, *pi*, and the diagonal of a square (the *alogon* of Plato's *Meno*) are

<sup>27</sup> *Paradiso* 1.70-71: "Transuminar significar *per verba*/non si poria"; "To signify man's soaring beyond man/words will not do." *Paradiso* 7.4-6: "Così, volgendosi a la nota sua,/fu viso a me cantare essa sustanza,/sopra la qual doppio lume s'addua"; "I heard, in rhythm with the harmony/of hosts, the singing of that radiance/bright with the twinning of a double ray." *Paradiso* 9.73-81: "'Dio vede tutto e tuo veder s'inluia,'/diss' io, 'beato spirto, sì che nulla/voglia di sé a te puot' esser fuia. Dunque la voce tua, che 'l ciel trastulla/sempre col canto di quei fuochi pii/che di sei ali facen la coculla,/perché non satisfice a' miei disii?/Già non attendere' io tua dimanda,/s'io m'intuassi, come tu t'inmii.'"; "'God sees all, and your vision so in-Hims,/O blessed soul,' said I, 'no will of man/can fly or be concealed from what you see./Then why do you by whom this heaven rings/in merry concord with those pious flames/who weave their silken cowls with their six wings,/Not raise your voice to satisfy my wish?/I wouldn't wait for you to speak your will,/if I could so in-you as you in-me.'" "*Paradiso* 28.37-39: "E quello avea la fiamma più sincera/cui men distava la favilla pura,/credo, però che più di lei s'invera"; "And the least distant from that purest fire/shone with the clearest flame, I think because/the point entruthed itself most fully there." The first two instances display rare points in which I find Esolen's translation lacking, since they appear to miss the new words coined by Dante.

some with which most of them are familiar. Leave faith aside: we know through *reason* that there are mathematical entities that go beyond reason and language, and that these entities exist in the world: look at any spiral or circle. If the subject of literature is life, then why not write sonnets about irrational numbers or the unobservable inner workings of black holes?28 Some people become English majors because they dislike mathematics and science; I try to show them that real English majors should not discount the poetic potential of these subjects. Dante certainly didn't: consider Statius' treatise on hylomorphic embryology in *Purgatorio* 25! These considerations were not entirely successful at impressing on my students the validity and importance of such apophatic poetry, but most of them were willing to grant that Dante was likely doing more in *Paradiso* than they could appreciate, which is a solid first step.

The last step, however, was to connect the great Italian poet to the struggles of young writers. Ultimately, by *Paradiso* 33, language utterly fails Dante, and his vision is impossible to put even into newly-invented words. At this point, epic begins to fall into lyric, and ends only in vision and silence:

Alas how feeble language is, how lame Beside my thought!—and, for what I was shown, To call thought 'small' would be too great a claim. O Light that dwell within Thyself alone, Who alone know Thyself, are known, and smile With Love upon the Knowing and the Known! That circle which appeared—in my poor style— Like a reflected radiance in Thee, After my eyes had studied it awhile, Within, and in its own hue, seemed to be Tinted with the figure of a Man, And so I gazed on it absorbedly . . . Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy (*Paradiso* 33.121-32, 142).29

Here my English majors who were creative writers began to articulate an understanding of the mystery at the heart of Dante's poetics. All authors struggle to find the right words for the phenomena they describe, and the description of a phenomenon is not identical to it. Think of the experience of falling in love: you could be the most eloquent poet in the language, but the fullness of that experience (a mysterious and divine experience, if you are Dante falling in love with Beatrice!) will ever elude being encapsulated in limited human language. Apophatic theology can be a hard concept for even well-formed, believing Christians to grasp; in Dante's final struggle to express himself, even non-religious students began to understand the importance of his struggle.<sup>30</sup> Before

<sup>28</sup> See Umberto Eco, "A Reading the *Paradiso*": "Dante's *Paradiso* is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the *Purgatorio*. The *Paradiso* is more than modern; it can become, for the reader who has forgotten history, a tremendously real element of the future. It represents the triumph of pure energy, which the labyrinth of the Web promises but will never be able to give us; it is an exaltation of floods and bodies without organs, an epic made of novas and white dwarf stars, and endless big bang, a story whose plot covers the distance of light-years, and, if you really want familiar examples, a triumphant space odyssey, with a very happy ending. You can read the *Paradiso* in this way too; it can never do you any harm, and it will be better than a disco with strobe lights or ecstasy. After all, with regard to ecstasy, Dante's third cantica keeps its promises and actually delivers it" (Eco 2002, p. 22).

<sup>29</sup> "Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco/al mio concetto! E questo, a quell ch'i' vidi,/è tanto, che non basta a dicer 'poco'./O luce etterna che sola in te sidi,/sola t'intendi, e da te intelletta/e intendente te ami e arridi!/Quella circulazion che sì concetta/pareva in te come lume reflesso,/da li occhi miei alquanto circunspetta,/dentro da sé, del suo colore stesso,/mi parve pinta de la nostra effige:/per che 'l mio viso in lei tutto era messo ... . A l'alta fantasia qui mancò possa" (*Paradiso* 33.121-32, 142).

<sup>30</sup> Apophatic theology is a way of understanding Christian revelation that stresses the utter other-ness of God from Creation. Etymologically, "apophatic" means a denial of speech: human language is formed from human experience, and the experience of God is so different from ordinary human realities that words fail. In *The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language*, (Crystal 2011) David Crystal puts the matter succinctly: "Those who believe in God are continually trying

*Paradiso*, Dante did not appear to struggle at all with his art, and was even a bit vainglorious.31 Dante's failure here resonated with the experiences of young writers, and even those students who had been hard on Dante (both the Poet and the Pilgrim) up to this point were able to give a bit of sympathy for and appreciation of the sheer achievement of the *Commedia*, the great epic of the Christian Intellectual Tradition.

#### **6. Conclusions**

Teaching what Dante called "the sacred poem" ("lo sacrato poema," *Paradiso* 23.62)32 is never easy, and any approach necessarily leaves much to be desired. I hope, however, that I have shared some helpful ways to bring Dante's essentially theological poetics into a solidly human realm, in order to reach students of any faith (or no faith). I should close by noting that this pedagogy is clearly not a violation of Dante's own epic, since what do we see in the Second Person of the Trinity?—"la nostra effige": "our [human] figure" (*Paradiso* 33.131).

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.

#### **References**

Baxter, Jason. 2018. *A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy*. Ada: Baker Academic Press.

Bourne, Ella. 1916. The Messianic Prophecy in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. *The Classical Journal* 11: 390–400.

Crystal, David. 2011. *The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Louth, Andrew. 1998. Apophatic Theology: Denys the Areopagite. *Hermathena* 168: 71–84.

Marsden, George M. 1994. *The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief*. New York: Oxford University Press.

to say what cannot be said" (Crystal 2011, p. 403). While the theological tradition has developed ways of predicating statements about God (particularly Thomas Aquinas's method of analogy), one must always be conscious of the fact that these predications are never complete nor sufficient to reflect the full reality of God. Apophatic theology predates Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, but apophatic approaches in Christianity tend to trace themselves back to his writings; for a more detailed account, see Andrew Louth, "Apophatic Theology: Denys the Areopagite" (Louth 1998, No. 165).

<sup>31</sup> Consider his literary *hybris* in *Inferno* 25: "Be silent, Lucan, where you touch upon/wretched Sabellus and Nasidius,/and listen to the arrow I shoot now./Be silent, Ovid, with your Arethusa/and Cadmus, where you poem turns/this to a serpent, that one to a spring;/I hold no grudge, for never front to front/did you transmute two natures so their forms/were ready to change matter with each other"; "Taccia Lucano omai là dov' e' tocca/del misero Sabello e di Nasidio,/e attenda a udir quell ch'or si scocca. /Taccia di Cadmo e d'Aretusa Ovidio,/ché se quello in serpent e quella in fonte/converte petando, io non lo 'nvidio;/ché due nature mai a fronte a fronte/non transmutò sì ch'amendue le forme/a cambiar lor matera fosser pronte" (*Inferno* 25.94-102). By the end of *Paradiso*, Dante is not telling Classic poets to be silent: he himself is reduced to silence.

<sup>32</sup> A wonderful initial resource to opening up the *Commedia* is Jason Baxter's *A Beginner's Guide to Dante's* Divine Comedy (Baxter 2018). Baxter has written eloquently on the sacred character of Dante's poetic achievement, and thus is a particularly useful resource for non-experts interested in Dante and the Christian Intellectual Tradition.


© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Teaching Dante in the History of Christian Theology**

#### **Bryan J. Whitfield**

Department of Religion, Mercer University, 1501 Mercer University Drive, Macon, GA 31201, USA; whitfield\_bj@mercer.edu

Received: 20 March 2019; Accepted: 5 June 2019; Published: 7 June 2019

**Abstract:** Outside of core curriculum programs or Great Books classes, few undergraduates who are not literature majors read and discuss Dante's *Divine Comedy*. This paper describes the redesign of a course in the history of Christian theology as a model for integrating the study of Dante into additional contexts within general education. Reading Dante not only as poet but also as theologian can enhance students' learning and their engagement with medieval theology. A focused reading of *Paradiso* provides a novel and exciting way for a survey course in historical theology to balance general education's needs for both breadth and depth. At the same time, reading Dante also helps students to experience the significant intersections of culture and theology in the medieval period.

**Keywords:** Dante; pedagogy; history of theology; core and general education curricula; interdisciplinarity; medieval theology; literary studies

#### **1. Introduction**

With respect to Dante, I was one of the lucky ones. As a college sophomore, I stumbled into an introductory literature course where the *Inferno* was the climax of the treatment of the hero's journey traced through Homer and Virgil to Dante. That class led me to become a comparative literature major and to enroll in an upper-level course on medieval narrative where I read the *Paradiso.* But most undergraduates in the early twenty-first century are not so blessed. Few have multiple opportunities to read and discuss the *Commedia.*

My current teaching context is a case in point. The college has two general education tracks. In the Great Books track, students read the *Commedia* in its entirety during the spring of their sophomore year. But in the more traditional distributional track that comprises nearly ninety percent of the student population, there are no general education courses where students read Dante. What is more surprising is that the *Commedia* appears on only one other reading list for a course in the college.

If my context is representative, it suggests that those of us who value Dante's central contribution to the Christian and Western intellectual traditions must be intentional about creating space for students to read the *Commedia.* This paper sketches my initial attempt to teach Dante within the context of a distributional general education program. I offer it as a model for integrating Dante into a discipline-specific course, reflecting on my institutional context, weighing Dante's role as a theologian, and outlining elements of course design and objectives before suggesting some strategies for teaching Dante across the curriculum.

#### **2. Finding Spaces in an Institutional Context**

Within our college's distributional track, students take one course from several options in the area of Western Heritage. These courses span several departments, including history, philosophy, English, classics, and religion. Religion 270, History of Christian Theology, is one course among these options. The catalogue describes this course as a "study of the ways Christian theology both shapes and is shaped by developments in Western culture from the rise of Christianity through the contemporary era."

Any instructor offering this undergraduate "History of Christian Theology" faces significant challenges. Primary among these is the course's span: "the rise of Christianity through the contemporary era." That long arc poses an inevitable tension between breadth and depth. Given this description, the typical course offering focuses on medieval theology for three to four weeks. Students normally read chapters from a secondary text on the history of Christian thought as well as primary texts. In recent years, instructors have used as secondary texts Alister McGrath's *Historical Theology* or Justo Gonzalez's *A History of Christian Thought: In One Volume,* along with primary readings from either McGrath's accompanying reader or Hugh Kerr's *Readings in Christian Thought* (McGrath 2013; Gonzalez 2014; McGrath 2016; Kerr 1990). These primary text selections may include readings from Anselm, Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William Ockham, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Thomas à Kempis. Given this welter of names and related theological topics, the instructor's challenge is to find ways to help students to understand both the larger picture of medieval theology and the development of theology across time.

A second challenge arising from the stated goal is that the course will explore the ways theology and Western culture interact. This exploration is particularly significant for the medieval period. Christian theology distinctively shapes the medieval world of Christendom. As such, it provides the paradigmatic example of the interaction of theology and culture in the West. Any effective study of the medieval period requires students to integrate insights from several disciplines, so successful students of the period must bring together theological and philosophical reading with insights from the arts, agriculture, politics, and economic life.

Given these challenges, I argue that Dante deserves consideration as a medieval theologian. Redesigning this course so that students read Dante's *Paradiso* for a month as their common primary reading provides a novel and exciting response to both challenges, as it balances breadth and depth while addressing the interaction of culture and theology. A guided reading of the *Paradiso* as theology provides an innovative and creative design for teaching the history of medieval theology that can enhance students' learning and engagement.

#### **3. Considering Dante as Theologian**

Some faculty and students may object at the outset to such a project, arguing that Dante belongs in a literature course but not a course in theology. Before exploring course design in detail, therefore, I offer a brief rationale for Dante's inclusion in this course with a consideration of Dante as theologian.

Specialists continue to debate whether the *Commedia* is "theology". Zygmunt Baranski, for example, concludes that in terms of philology, it is inaccurate to label Dante as a theologian or his work as theology (Baranski 2013a, 2013b). Yet, as Vittorio Montemaggi argues, even Baranski's own work shows both that Dante intended for his poem to effect spiritual change in his readers' lives and that he was in line with prevailing theological currents (Montemaggi 2016, p. 62). Dante does not align himself with a particular theological school, since he is aware the divine mystery tempers all human conceptualization of God. Yet Montemaggi argues for the *Commedia* as theology because it "can help us deepen, enrich, and refine our understanding of what theology is or could be. From our contemporary perspective it makes sense—it can, indeed, be fruitful—to refer to the *Commedia* as theology, as discourse and inquiry about God wishing to aid us in our comprehension of our relationship with, and in our journeying into the divine" (Montemaggi 2016, p. 63).

#### **4. Outlining the Course Design**

Over the course of the five-week unit on medieval theology, students meet twice weekly for a total of ten seventy-five-minute class sessions. Individual students are responsible for leading discussion on primary texts throughout the semester. They prepare a brief biographical overview of the author as well as discussion questions and small group activities for the class in consultation with me. That pattern continues during our work with Dante and the other medieval theologians. At the end of the unit, students produce a close reading of one canto in *Paradiso* that interacts with one or two of the theologians we have studied.

Given that framework, the ten sessions move through a reading of *Paradiso,* often paired with readings from medieval theologians. As much as possible, I use readings in the assigned collection of primary texts, but I also provide supplemental readings as needed. The following discussion provides a sketch of those pairings for some of the class sessions.

Before our initial meeting, for example, students read the first three cantos alongside selections from Augustine's *Confessions*, including the opening paragraphs and selections on time and eternity, as well as from Pseudo-Dionysius's *The Mystical Theology* (Kerr 1990, pp. 52–60, 64–65; Baxter 2018, pp. 123–33, 139–44; Pseudo-Dionysius 1987, pp. 133–41). These readings lead them to a deeper understanding of the ineffability of God and Dante's inability to describe his heavenly vision fully (*Par.* 1.1–36). For the second meeting, students read selections from Augustine on free will and predestination to engage those themes in *Paradiso* 4 and 5 as Beatrice answers Dante's questions about the broken vows of Piccarda and Constance (Kerr 1990, pp. 61–62).

The third meeting features readings from Anselm and Abelard on atonement that pair with Beatrice's explanation of the way of redemption in *Paradiso* 7—a composite of the positions of Anselm and Thomas Aquinas (Kerr 1990, pp. 82–95; Hawkins 2006, p. 109). This canto also frames a broader discussion of divine love in Dante. As Peter Hawkins argues, this material provides a clear example of Dante's work as a theological teacher, as he presents the tradition through the words of Beatrice, offers a survey of possible understandings, and selects one theological position among others (Hawkins 2006, p. 109).

In the fourth meeting, readings from Thomas Aquinas and Francis of Assisi pair with *Paradiso* 10–12, where Dante the pilgrim hears the story of St. Francis from the Dominican St. Thomas and that of St. Dominic from the Franciscan St. Bonaventure (Kerr 1990, pp. 101–19). This pairing provides students with the opportunity to grasp differences between these two founders of competing religious orders but also to see how Dante's use of metaphor underscores their commonalities, creating two encircling wreaths of souls that even include Aquinas's archenemy, Siger of Brabant. Dante's heaven, as Jason Baxter observes, is a vibrant unity of song and dance that nonetheless contains "an uncompromising diversity and plurality" (Baxter 2018, p. 160).

Many of the later class meetings focus almost exclusively on *Paradiso,* and students work collaboratively in class to understand what their reading of Dante is teaching them about theology. Dante's theological examination in *Paradiso* 24, 25, and 26, for example, provides an occasion for reflection on the theological virtues. But the last class meeting returns to the pattern of pairing *Paradiso* with readings from other theologians: the final cantos of *Paradiso* lend themselves to the comparison of Dante's account with other mystical visions, like those of Dante's final guide, Bernard of Clairvaux, as well as those of Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich (Kerr 1990, pp. 96–98, 125–30).

Instructors who have less time allotted for the unit on medieval theology can easily adapt this approach, since their students can still read some cantos of *Paradiso* alongside their study of particular theologians or topics. Pairing *Paradiso* 1 with a discussion of ineffability or *Paradiso* 7 with medieval discussions of atonement, for example, works well without the rest of the framework sketched above.

#### **5. Meeting Course Objectives**

This five-week unit on the *Paradiso* preserves the breadth of theological voices and significant doctrinal discussions that students would encounter reading select primary texts alongside a secondary history of Christian thought. The process helps students to gain an appreciation for the broad consensus of medieval theology that Dante often presents, but it also enables them to grasp a range of theological positions. On the pages of *Paradiso,* they can begin to approach theology as a conversation. They can begin to see that theology is a living tradition, so that in the words of Alistair McIntyre, it is "an historically extended, socially embodied argument" (McIntyre 1984, p. 222). Dante often brings different positions together on one page, modeling the work of the theologian in presenting alternatives

and taking positions on various questions. Dante thus teaches students not only the ideas of theology but also something of the process of reflection and engagement with the theological tradition, providing a depth to the study of medieval theology other texts do not as easily convey.

Reading Dante in the history of theology also provides students with at least three ways to understand the interaction of theology and Western culture in a profound way through their encounter with Dante's "sacred poem" (*Par.* 25.1). First, any reader of the poem encounters Dante's capacious vision that reaches beyond theology to embrace all parts of life, from politics to erotic love to astronomy, all presented alongside the theological concepts with which Dante interacts. Theology is not a discipline removed from other spheres of life but integral to them—and reading Dante makes that clearer than other approaches to teaching the history of the tradition. Secondly, Dante's writing provides a crucial demonstration of the ways the Christian tradition shapes the West and is at the same time shaped by the culture, as he both receives and transforms the theological tradition he inherits. He affirms his beliefs in central theological tenets while at the same time putting his own stamp on them. As Peter Hawkins puts it, "he gave us a new account of everything old" (Hawkins 2006, p. 130). Finally, Dante provides an opportunity to examine the influence of theology on Western culture through an examination of what Hawkins has called "his afterlife". Hawkins traces Dante's influence on the subsequent literary tradition, including Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Seamus Heaney, among others. Dante's influence on the tradition of visual arts is equally extensive, ranging from William Blake to Joshua Reynolds to Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Hawkins, p. 137–50). Similarly, Joan Acocella underscores the influence of Dante on composers—Franz Liszt's *Dante Symphony* and Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky's *Francesca da Rimini: Symphonic Fantasy after Dante*, *Op.* 32 (Acocella 2013). For some class sessions, I have students listen to parts of these compositions or read short extracts of poems where Dante's influence appears. Dante's afterlife continues even in more contemporary cultural expressions. Hawkins also notes Dante's influence on the *New Yorker* cartoons of Robert Mankoff and Edward Frascino and the comics of Gary Panter, as well as a variety of films and television shows (Hawkins 2006, pp. 131–37, 150–53, 159–63). Other authors like Rod Dreher make the case that reading Dante provides wisdom for shaping contemporary lives (Dreher 2015).

These examples, along with others, indicate that students who read *Paradiso* find themselves better equipped to meet the course goal of understanding the interaction of theology and Western culture.

#### **6. Teaching Dante across the Curriculum**

This course redesign suggests a possible model for introducing students to Dante in the context of general education. The first step is for instructors to brainstorm about places where Dante might find a foothold in their institution's current general education curriculum, even in places where connections are not immediately apparent. Instructors might consider reading Dante in a survey course in Western civilization, or in medieval history or literature. Instructors might develop a literature course where students could trace his influence in literature and the arts. Courses that examine the themes of community or exiles and refugees—in the humanities or in political science—might find room for Dante as well.

Once instructors identify possible courses, they will need to consider ways Dante satisfies and enriches the goals that a specific course description sets out, preparing to make the case for Dante's inclusion as needed with departments or college curriculum committees and students. Beyond that, they will begin to develop specific plans for integrating Dante into their course, developing reading lists, planning activities, and crafting assignments. In taking up this task, instructors will enable students to stumble across the *Commedia* in expected and unexpected places. In so doing, they may help them to discover that this poem is, as one of my students put it, a living text. In reading and discussing Dante, they—both instructors and students—may find themselves as well among the lucky ones, among the blessed.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**

Acocella, Joan. 2013. What the Hell: Dante in Translation and Dan Brown's New Novel. *The New Yorker*, May 27.

Baranski, Zygmunt G. 2013a. (Un)orthodox Dante. In *Reviewing Dante's Theology*. Edited by Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne. Bern: Peter Lang, vol. 2, pp. 253–330.

Baranski, Zygmunt G. 2013b. Dante and Doctrine (and Theology). In *Reviewing Dante's Theology*. Edited by Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne. Bern: Peter Lang, vol. 1, pp. 9–63.

Baxter, Jason M. 2018. *A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy*. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.

Dreher, Rod. 2015. *How Dante Can Save Your Live: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History's Greatest Poem*. New York: Regan Arts.

Gonzalez, Justo L. 2014. *A History of Christian Thought: In One Volume*. Nashville: Abingdon.

Hawkins, Peter S. 2006. *Dante: A Brief History*. Malden: Blackwell.

Kerr, Hugh T. 1990. *Readings in Christian Thought*, 2nd ed. Nashville: Abingdon.

McGrath, Alister E. 2013. *Historical Theology: An Introduction to the History of Christian Thought*, 2nd ed. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

McGrath, Alister E. 2016. *The Christian Theology Reader*, 5nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley.

McIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. *After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory*, 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Montemaggi, Vittorio. 2016. *Reading Dante's Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter*. New York: Oxford University Press.

Pseudo-Dionysius. 1987. *Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works*. Translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist.

© 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

### *Article* **Learning to Read Big Books: Dante, Spenser, Milton**

#### **Christopher A. Hill**

Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages, University of Tennessee Martin, Martin, TN 38238, USA; chrish@utm.edu

Received: 6 March 2019; Accepted: 18 April 2019; Published: 25 April 2019

**Abstract:** The interpretive challenges posed by dense and lengthy poems such as Dante's *Inferno*, Spenser's *Faerie Queene*, and Milton's *Paradise Lost* can prove daunting for the average undergraduate reader whose experience of texts has been circumscribed by pedagogical mandates focused on reading for information. While information-retrieval based reading certainly has its place, the experience of reading these longer, more allegorical and symbolic poems can create in the attentive reader a far more valuable kind of learning, understood by Dante and his heirs, all working from Homeric and Virgilian models, as understanding. Each of these long poems pay very close attention to acts of interpretation, foregrounding the experiences of their characters to illustrate the proper way to move from sense, past speculation, to true understanding. Those who heed these lessons, and embrace the experience offered by the poet, find that the daunting task has been outlined as the necessary step to true knowledge rather than mere information.

**Keywords:** Dante; Milton; Spenser

#### **1. "Read It Well"**

In the introductory poem of Ben Jonson's grouping of epigrams in his 1616 Folio, he makes a request of his reader:

Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my book in hand, To read it well: that is, to understand. (Jonson 1996, p. 35)

Jonson is famously impatient with the wrong kinds of readers—those unable to comprehend his carefully constructed epideictic poems even as he pulls from all the considerable Horatian and Ciceronian resources at his disposal. He certainly held "being understood" as a focal point of his literary and critical practice; one of his greatest professional challenges came in his development of the Jacobean court masque as an allegorical vehicle for moral education. His audience, including King James himself, was predictably more taken by the visual and somatic spectacle of the masque performance than the moral instruction for which it was supposed to be a vehicle. For Jonson the poet, working in whatever secondary medium he requires as a vehicle, passive consumption of a spectacle, no matter how marvelous the invention, is insufficient without the exercise of judgment that leads to understanding. Later autobiographical poems, such as the "Ode to Himself" and his "Epistle to John Selden," express his continuing struggle to bridge the gap between poetic intent and reader response. The understanding Jonson values in his readers—or, ideally, hearers—is necessary so that they can apprehend the ethical qualities marking the very best poetry. However, as he is all too aware, this understanding is not an automatic response; it must be nurtured and trained into being.

Jonson's concern mirrors that of many a teacher facing a great poetic work while trying to educate younger or more inexperienced readers in the arts of understanding. This is particularly urgent in an era when traditional humanities disciplines appear to be a hard sell to students for whom a university degree must demonstrate obvious utility in the broader working world of professional credentialing. The task of poetic interpretation is made even more difficult when undergraduate students come

to works of the past—especially epic scale poetry—having been trained as consumers or users of informational texts. As the Tennessee state standards for English Language Arts are presented:

The ELA standards are designed to prepare students with the most important knowledge and 21st century literacy skills necessary to succeed in post-secondary and workforce arenas. The standards emphasize critical and divergent thinking, problem solving, active listening, recognition of patterns and anomalies, and evaluation and questioning of source material.

The standards reinforce the three ELA instructional shifts: regular practice with complex text and its academic vocabulary; reading and writing grounded in evidence from literary and informational text; and building knowledge through content-rich literary and informational text. (tn.gov)

The *Tennessee English*/*Language Arts Standards* manual for instructors promulgated by the Tennessee State Board of Education makes it very clear: All reading standards (see pp. 25–39) must apply roughly equally to "literary" and "informational" texts, because reading is defined as "a cognitively demanding skill. With careful guidance and instruction, students can fluently read words and sentences, so they can have access to the world of ideas presented to them in print" (Tennessee State Board of Education 2018, p. 26). Though it is beyond the scope or purpose of this essay to criticize the decisions made at administrative levels for primary and secondary English instruction, it is appropriate to point out that these kinds of mandates have significant cognitive effects on the students who labor under them. One effect of reading thus defined is that a student must naturally view any given piece of "serious" written discourse as a series of propositions which only need be remembered and repeated on demand in order to be "understood." Students are thus trained to be consumers of written texts in much the same way that they are perhaps less consciously trained to be consumers of electronic media.

It is unsurprising for a university student to be exposed to at least a portion of a demanding narrative poem such as John Milton's *Paradise Lost* or Edmund Spenser's *The Faerie Queene*; these are standard fixtures of literature textbooks and provide touchstones for literature survey classes, as does the *Inferno* portion of Dante Alighieri's *Commedia*. My observations of student responses to these poems in a regional public university provides the context for what follows. The affective reach of these poems is undeniable; in the case of Milton, for instance, even the most religiously disinclined and Biblically illiterate student is impressed by the *energiea* of Milton's blank verse and the grand sweep of his ambition. Many also gladly announce, in writing exercises, that by reading *Paradise Lost* they have learned a lot about Satan and Hell that they never knew before. Though the experienced reader of Milton might gape at such a statement, the student reaction makes perfect sense and even shows that interpretive effort is not in fact lacking; the gathering of information is the only way they know how to approach the task of reading.

The sore-beset literature professor knows that this is hardly the mode of reading Jonson requests for his own relatively brief and plain-spoken poems, and it is certainly a very long way from Milton's "fit audience, though few" (Milton 1957, 7.31), strenuously sought out in the midst of evil days, "with dangers compassed round/And solitude" (Milton 1957, 7.25–28). The works listed above are not invested merely in narrow doctrinal ends enumerated as in a catechism; they are not merely parables or riddles wherein the answer or lesson is implicit in the phrasing of the beginning. In fact, each epic poem aims at making or "fashioning" (as Spenser highlights in his *Letter to Ralegh*) not only its narrative characters but also its readers: Those who are provided with a challenging, even daunting experience mirroring the quests and tests about which they are reading. If highly allusive and rhetorically dense poems such as the *Commedia* or *Paradise Lost* are valuable to undergraduates, it cannot be merely because they provide "information" about the torments of Hell, or the character of Satan, or the origins of Saint George, and frankly it cannot be because these poems provide the opportunity for instructors to gain measurable assessment data points. Instead, these weighty epics provide an experience that cannot be replicated in other forms of reading. Philip Sidney's *Defense of Poetry* calls poetry "food for the tenderest stomachs" (Sidney 1999, p. 34). In providing tender food, Dante, Spenser, and Milton

also carefully usher their readers into scenes of instruction in reading. However dark the wood or steep the path, whatever the burden, the understanding reader will embrace it all as a totality, gaining in the experience forms of knowledge and skill that are much greater than the sum of their parts. These skills and knowledge, once gained, are never static or simple, but can inform every intellectual phase of a student's career. Thus, do epic poems manifest the greatest kind of reading possible, and the greatest teaching of that art they so dramatically require.

#### **2. Visions of Hell**

The drama inherent in renderings of the underworld, or Hell, provides a bracing example of how reading must be conceived as more than gathering data points. Generally, the poets of these works show how demanding the work can get. The self-consciousness of the narrative structure in the *Commedia* needs no elaborate unpacking; Dante describes a journey into Hell in *Inferno* that is instigated and guided by Virgil, both as literary forebear and as physical guide. Dante takes the few tableaux provided by Virgil in the sixth book of *The Aeneid* and expands on them as set-pieces by which moral and philosophical truths are explored by symbolic representation of specific cases taken from history and myth (See *The Spenser Encyclopedia*, s.v. Dante Alighieri). As such, Dante's narrator frequently offers direct admonition so that the reader of the poem will remember to look and interpret carefully. For instance, in the tense moments before the gates of Dis, we read the following right before the "herald sent from Heaven" (Alighieri 2003, 9.85) clears the way:

O you whose intellects see clear and whole, gaze on the doctrine that is hidden here beneath the unfamiliar verses' veil. (Alighieri 2003, 9.61–63)

If the verses serve as a veil for some hidden doctrine, the narrator still urges the reasonable reader to search for what lies beneath them—that is, what the words on the page simultaneously reveal and conceal. This is only one of countless moments when readers are directly enjoined to attend closely to the descriptive imagery. As the monstrous Geryon approaches the narrator at the end of Canto 16, the narrator and author collapse into each other in a remarkably evocative depiction of authorial and interpretive anxiety:

Knowing a truth whose face appears a lie, a man should always keep his lips shut tight as long as he can, lest he be tagged with shame Though he has told the truth; but I cannot keep silent here, and, Reader, by the notes of this my Comedy, I swear—and may They keep in favor long—through that thick air I saw a figure swimming in the night, such as would stun the surest heart with wonder. (Alighieri 2003, 16.124–32)

Certainly, one could see in a moment like this an assertion of poetic virtuosity; the description that follows will be so fantastic that the poet is describing something beyond the power of language. Such is the nature of ambitious poetry. From the standpoint of the rhetorical moment involved, such narrative frame-breaking is necessary so that the reader does not merely look, but engages the intellect to see. Geryon is certainly a remarkable and vivid sight all on his own, yet it is also true that such a long self-conscious prologue to the description has our attention firmly fixed by the time he appears. Thus prepared, we can better see the whole, rather than merely the sum, of Geryon's parts. As described in the opening lines of Canto 17, the honest, kindly countenance combined with the serpentine body and furry legs are deliberately jarring. These various parts are literally incongruous, albeit whole rather than mutilated. The arabesques on its sides seem strangely opulent, even hypnotic, perhaps deflecting the unwary pilgrim's attention from the "venomous fork" at the end of its tail (Alighieri 2003, 17.1–27). As a monster, Geryon is also named as a sign of deceit, so the reader's struggle is to envision the monstrous while also experiencing bemused and even disgusted wonder. Though Geryon's interstitial appearance is particularly dramatic, the Hell Dante describes is full of sights carrying this same weight; there are, in fact, so many that they easily overwhelm the reader just as they do the narrator. Their number and intensity are relentless and cumulative; the pilgrim's experience becomes the reader's experience—wonder, fear, weariness—in an exemplary symbiosis that Dante deliberately emphasizes.

Edmund Spenser, on the other hand, while also pulling from Virgil, offers comparatively oblique and brief reflections of Hell in the *The Faerie Queene*—parts of the classical rendering reconfigured for the multifarious geography of "Faery Lond." Redcrosse Knight begins his quest of holiness lost in a dark wood and literally stumbles across a monstrous creature of fraud in a dark cave (Spenser 2001, 1.1), calling to mind both the Homeric and Virgilian source material but also the opening sequence of the *Inferno*. Poor Fradubio, imprisoned in a tree yet able to speak in 1.2.31–43, is a clever joining of Ovidian metamorphoses (Daphne, Syrinx, and Myrrha, for instance) with the *Inferno's* wood of the suicides in Canto 13. Both Archimago and Duessa, personifications of malicious deceit in Book 1, descend into the underworld—the former by using familiar spirits who exit "Morpheus house" with its double gates of ivory and horn (Spenser 2001, 1.1.39–40), and the latter descending into "grisly Pluto's realm" where she witnesses the same torments described by Virgil in *The Aeneid* and gathered into mythographical handbooks: Ixion's wheel, Sisyphus's stone, Tantalus's thirst, Theseus's chair of forgetfulness, and Hippolytus's dismemberment (Spenser 2001, 1.5.38–45).

Redcrosse Knight himself experiences a kind of damnation when he spends nine months in the hell that is the dungeon of Orgoglio's castle (Spenser 2001, 1.8.38). He is only freed by Prince Arthur's recreation of Christ's harrowing of Hell, wherein he breaks down the dungeon door and physically retrieves the suffering knight who cannot carry himself on his "feeble thighes" (Spenser 2001, 1.8.39–40). The spiritual damage from Redcrosse's descent into the hellish underworld is partially restored by Una's gracious reception of her wayward knight, but must be further painfully cauterized by his purgatorial confrontation with Despair in Canto 9 and his arduous ascent of Mount Contemplation in Canto 10: "Thence forward by that painful way that pas,/Forth to an hill, that was both steepe and hy" (Spenser 2001, 1.10.46).

Spenser's Knight of Temperance enters into another version of Hell in his journey through the Cave of Mammon in Book 2. Whereas Dante's pilgrim has Virgil to protect and exhort him, Guyon must make his journey without a guide. His three-day journey through the realms of night, wherein he sees many of the same classical features of Hades, creates in him a deep lassitude of body and spirit, though he does not ever explicitly fall victim to the various temptations Mammon proffers. He does, however, collapse immediately upon emerging into the daylight. Having had no guide but appetite, and no protection besides the exertion of his own considerable will, his preservation is entirely the work of divine intervention in the person of Prince Arthur, who thus reprises the role he first played in Book One when he rescued Redcrosse Knight from Orgoglio's dungeon. Spenser's versions of Hell or Hades are not the focal points of the characters' quests, though they do illustrate important constitutive aspects of their signal virtues and as such provide scenes where moral truths as character developments can be illustrated narratively.

Milton, meanwhile, dramatically departs both from the classical paradigm and from the stark silence of Dante's Lucifer, stuck in the ice of Cocytus (*Inferno* Canto 34). While Satan's very first phrase is one borne out of isolation, ruin, and confusion—"If thou beest he" (Milton 1957, 1.84)—he quickly recovers, proving restless and voluble. He commands the attention of the fallen angel and reader alike by the vividness of his character and of his heroic rhetoric, claiming to be the new possessor of Hell and asserting the primacy of his will over the circumstance of his damnation. Vain speculation also claims attention in Hell, for not only are the fallen angels busy creating for themselves castles built from the very stuff mined from Hell's guts, but they also engage in epic scale activities ranging from exploration to heroic games to philosophy (Milton 1957, 2.521–628). Those who choose the rigors of exploration discover a topography of horror that recalls the first view of Dante's pilgrim in *Inferno*:

Thus roving on In confus'd march forlorn, th' adventrous Bands With shuddring horror pale, and eyes agast View'd first thir lamentable lot, and found No rest: through many a dark and drearie Vaile They pass'd, and many a Region dolorous, O'er many a Frozen, many a fierie Alpe, Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death, A Universe of death, which God by curse Created evil, for evil only good, Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, Abominable, inutterable, and worse Then Fables yet have feign'd, or fear conceiv'd, Gorgons and Hydra's, and Chimera's dire. (Milton 1957, 2.614–28)

Milton catalogues this hellish topography on an alpine scale so that the attentive reader might be taken aback. Like the cacophony that stuns Dante's pilgrim at the opening of *Inferno* Canto 3, the assault on the senses is overwhelming. While these scenes are disclosed to the horrified eyes of the lesser fallen angels, the reader's curiosity is not sated; again very much like Dante's pilgrim, we are not allowed to stand and gaze but must move with the narrative into a new phase requiring new responses. Satan's own heroic journey out of Hell, for instance, provides an infernal parody of the heroic voyages undertaken into and out of Hades by Odysseus and Aeneas. We are thereby given multiple frames of reference within which to view the arresting imagery of Hell: The forlorn and shuddering subordinate fallen angels, the fallen archangel adopting the pose of the classical hero, and the dark materials of Milton's literary and historical precursors, including Homer, Virgil, and Dante.

#### **3. Interpretations of Hell**

In none of these cases do we receive "information" about Hell, though the Dantean and Miltonic depictions are so intense that they seem to be assertions about its true nature, luring the unwary reader into a literalistic misreading along the lines of William Blake's (see *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*). The lack of irony in tone, unflagging *enargeia* in invention, and careful command of vernacular verse forms put the reader under extraordinary tension, even temptation. In order to avoid a "fall," to borrow from Stanley Fish's famous reading of Milton, the reader must work very hard to interpret rather than merely consume (Fish 1997, p. 9). In addition to their careful placement of the reader into scenes where proper interpretation is paramount, each of these writers also provides an admonition: Beware a poor reading.

Spenser, whose epic focus is more diffuse, uses examples of consumption without judgment twice in the Legend of Redcrosse Knight. In Book One, Redcrosse Knight is effortlessly seduced by Duessa in Canto 2 because he "busies his quick eyes" with the affected and fraudulent, though not inconsiderable, beauty of her face rather than opening his "dull ears" to hear what she says (Spenser 2001, 1.2.26). Likewise, when he hears Fraudubio's lamentable tale in the latter part of the same canto he cannot tell what it means except that it seems lamentable; in addition to being distracted by Duessa's strategic swoon (Spenser 2001, 1.2.44–45), he is unable to interpret the tale at this still-early stage of his own education. That he falls victim to Duessa's blandishments in Canto 7, and then almost completely succumbs to Despair in Canto 9, makes his purgatorial education in Canto 10 even more necessary.

Dante's pilgrim cannot be allowed the same luxury of trial and error that Spenser provides to Redcrosse Knight. As such, the pilgrim is put through a rigorous course in interpretation, not allowed to merely consume what he sees. In fact, to the extent that he can see at all, his eyes are too weak to penetrate the gloom:

So dark it was and deep and bleared with mist,

that though I fixed my gaze upon the bottom, I still could not discern a single thing. (Alighieri 2003, 4.10–12)

This description is not as terse as Milton's "darkness visible" (Milton 1957, 1.63), but the effect is the same in both cases: Speculation, in the sense that it involves physical sight of whatever spectacle Hell might present to the senses, must ultimately prove insufficient. Dante's double displacement of the reader from the experience—that is, the reader must receive his or her impressions through the senses of a narrator whose own apprehension is often obscured or doubtful—means that the act of interpretation is especially crucial: As Virgil himself makes clear, sometimes Dante's pilgrim, the reader's only guide, misunderstands or allows his frailty to interpose on his apprehension. To view Hell is to view suffering in extravagant and memorable ways. The weight of such visions is not inconsiderable on an already weakened protagonist: He faints dead away when he sees those abandoned to the whirlwinds at the gates of Hell. He faints for sorrow upon hearing Francesca's story in Canto 5. The suicide in Canto 13 calls forth his pity, and he weeps for pity in Canto 20 at the wrenched bodies of the diviners; he is at this point rebuked by his guide Virgil: "Even now, with all the other fools!" (Alighieri 2003, 20.27). At the beginning of Canto 29, the "mob of souls" makes the pilgrim want to stop and weep. Virgil rebukes him again in Canto 30 when he too curiously eavesdrops on the argument between Sinon and Master Adam—it is "a base desire" (Alighieri 2003, 30.148) to eavesdrop on the wrangling that is tickling his ears. In each of these cases, to be sure, the reader is implicated in the fault criticized in the pilgrim.

Meanwhile, the rigors of the journey tax the pilgrim's moral and physical energies to such an extent that the road is often too hard for him. Sometimes he is carried, as at the end of Canto 19 and in Canto 23. In Canto 24, he simply sits down and threatens to give up; Virgil cajoles him to continue with an appeal to fame and glory: "Turn that to profit, if you understand," he says (Alighieri 2003, 24.57). In other words, though there is a considerable spectacle to be viewed in Hell, the pilgrim is not allowed to be a mere spectator. He must learn to manage his own reactions to what he sees, applying reason to perception so that he might always remember his philosophy (as Virgil enjoins him in 6.106).

Spenser's knights must also confront similar challenges. Redcrosse Knight views a tableau of *contrapasso* in the House of Pride—that is, the palace ruled by Lucifera—in Canto 4. For instance, Gluttony is depicted as a fat monk on a swine, eating, drinking, and vomiting all at the same time, swollen with fatness and suffering from the dropsy as a result of his overindulgence. Though Redcrosse does not directly take part in the parade of the seven deadly sins, the moral weariness created by his extended exposure to sin, and the combat with Sans Joy, creates a weakness exploited by Duessa when she finds Redcrosse beside the magic fountain in Canto 7, disarmed of his "yron-coted plate" (Spenser 2001, 1.7.2). His susceptibility to her particular brand of temptation is intensified by his physical and moral unreadiness symbolized in this unarmed state and his lassitude: "Crudled cold his corage gan assailed,/And cheerfull blood in faintness chill did melt,/Which like a fever fit through all his body swelt" (Spenser 2001, 1.7.6). Likewise Guyon, as he traverses the Cave of Mammon, views the punishments of Tantalus and Pilate (2.7.56–62) and like Dante's pilgrim is anxious to ask the tormented soul about his fate. However, having been three days in the underworld, he finds that his "vitall powers gan wexe Bothe weake and wan,/For want of food, and sleepe, which to upbeare,/like mightie pillours, this fraile life of man" (Spenser 2001, 2.7.65). It almost costs him his life.

Milton's Hell is not interpreted by passers-through or by outside observers; he puts the work of interpretation into the words of the fallen angels themselves, who, like some of the infernal creatures in Dante's Hell, prefer to think that they are managing their own affairs. *Paradise Lost* Book Two provides several perspectives on the nature of Hell, and though the narrator has already provided a fairly definitive statement of the power of God's providence (1.209–20), other points of view are debated and even strongly considered (if overdetermined by the manipulations of Satan). Moloch sees the topography of Hell as raw material for weapons of war and the most brutish battle instinct; Belial sees Hell as a painful refuge to be stoically endured as a punishment until the Sovereign grows bored and forgetful; Mammon prefers to colonize it and remake it into a kingdom rising in emulation

opposite Heaven. Not for nothing is Mammon's suggestion the favorite among the fallen angels until Beelzebub plays his role in suggesting what has been determined will happen anyway.

Even as Satan takes on the trappings of the heroic quest, we do find the other fallen angels engaged in the kind of futile parodies of action described in Dante's *Inferno*: Heroic games, adventures of exploration, music, and even stoic philosophy. Other parodic features include the infernal parody of the trinity in the incestuous relationships between Satan, Sin, and Death, and the parody of the Tree of Knowledge in Book 10, where the fallen angels are all subjected to a punishment worthy of Dante: Their forms, even the degenerate versions, are transformed to those of serpents, whereupon they crawl to eat of a tree "like that/Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve/Used by the tempter" (Milton 1957, 10.550–2). The fruit turns to ashes in their mouths:

They fondly thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugged as oft, With hatefulest disrelish writhed their jaws With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell Into the same illusion, not as man Whom they triumphed once lapsed. (Milton 1957, 10.564–71)

The fruit that turns to ashes is the synecdoche for how Milton's poem addresses false or deficient knowledge, apparently simple in its attainment but disappointing or worse in its substance. This kind of knowledge is, in fact, "illusion," a misunderstanding even of the nature of the true Tree of Knowledge—a point made manifest in Satan's recasting of Adam's "sign of our obedience" to his equivocal question, "do they only stand by ignorance?" (Milton 1957, 4. 428, 515–20). Even after they are confronted with "hatefulest disrelish"—that is, the actual bitter experience of their supposed knowledge—they continue to afflict themselves, though they should have learned better. But this is the reason so much attention is paid to Hell as a dramatic scene with its own actors: The fallen angels—from Satan to every one of his followers—are fallen precisely because they never learned to understand their condition.

#### **4. "To Understand"**

The foregoing descriptions are merely fragments of works written at such massive scale that full comprehension is almost too daunting, especially for the reader looking for mere information. One writes and speaks about fragments and sections of these poems because each single poem encompasses a mythic cosmos. Instead of making the reader traverse a chaos "without bound/Without dimension" (Milton 1957, 2.892–93) like Satan in *Paradise Lost* Book 2, each single poem provides the above exemplary depictions of interpretation and misinterpretation in order to train the reader—by experience and by example—into the arts of understanding.

One watchword for this learning process comes from a key phrase in Satan's temptation of Eve in Book 9 of *Paradise Lost.* As the serpent speaks to Eve, he describes how after eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge he finds that his mind has been greatly expanded—so much so that he was able to turn his mind to "speculations high or deep" (Milton 1957, 9.602). Since the episode is made up—Satan never directly touches the Tree of Knowledge, much less the fruit; in fact, his only knowledge of it comes from Adam's discourse about it in Book 4—the speculations he refers to are entirely self-generated and fraudulent. In this way, then, the speculations are merely another birth of Sin from his head (as Sin herself memorably recounts in their reunion before the gates of Hell in Book 2). To speculate is to look, but with faulty vision; it is to peer into the darkness and rely on conjecture as the fallen angels do when they "reason'd high/Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate" (Milton 1957, 2.558–59)—words that play major roles in the discourses to follow. The result of this vain philosophy is to be lost in wandering mazes. They, like their leader, are misled by these

notions they generate, because though they seem to see details they cannot combine those details to properly inform their reasoning; the shape of the maze is beyond their ken. Neither Dante nor Spenser nor Milton encourages readerly speculation about what their characters experience; that is why each includes so many guiding and shaping segments, whether invocations or corrections or commentaries. This is also why each poet grounds his philosophical and theological discourse in powerful visual idioms that even when not directly allegorical tend to fix abstractions into shape. This is true in Hell, in the House of Alma, in Paradise—in every physical location wherein the actions are placed so as to give them a local habitation and a name. A reader avoiding the fault of speculation understands that every description, every account, is neither given only for itself nor for free association, but for the ways their combinations feed his or her reasoning powers.

The other watchword, as invoked in the opening paragraphs of this essay, is "information." The copiousness of Dante's invention, and his mythic and topical allusiveness, are unsurpassed in weight and variety—though Spenser and Milton are the English poets who most closely approach him in their own particular idioms. Avoiding broad speculation is indeed good; the other temptation is to chase down every particularity like Burton's roving spaniel from *The Anatomy of Melancholy.* The individual pictures, the descriptions, the miniature dramas are all tempting, and can present themselves as riddles to be solved. Dante chooses to place his moral exempla in historical and mythological figures, sometimes relying on a topicality that seems to be a provocation. Spenser's allegory is particularly powerful this way, tempting the unwary student into footnote seeking—as if there is a key to unlock the meaning of the whole in determining the topical referentiality of Acrasia, Lucifera, or Satyrane. Adam's discourse with Raphael begins to veer into the minutiae of angelic sex and into the particularities of celestial motion—both of which Raphael gently rebukes as beside the point that Adam should attend to. To seek for bare "information" about the movement of the celestial spheres would not actually increase his understanding about the moral task ahead of him. Taking the pointed examples each writer provides, and accepting each man's assertion that the experience of careful interpretation must be fully embraced without shortcut, is the way to read properly.

Each work also balances that topical referentiality and allegorical specificity with a narrative frame—that is, the journey of Dante's pilgrim, the quest of the Spenserian knight, or the epic spiritual struggles of Adam and Eve in the face of their tempter. Each work tests but also allures its reader, gently leading him or her into the interpretive mindset necessary to understand how the pilgrims and protagonists themselves are being educated into the right interpretations of their experiences. The richness in works like these—the value of big, capacious books—is that they are totalizing experiences, resisting any unwise reader's urge to reduce them to lists of facts. The teacher who serves as the student's Virgil, or Palmer, can show how the beauties and challenges of poetry are Sidney's cluster of grapes, providing food for tender stomachs and inviting us further into the vineyard.

**Funding:** The author received no funding for this project.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflicts of interest.

#### **References**

Alighieri, Dante. 2003. *Inferno*. Translated and Edited by Anthony Esolen. New York: Modern Library. Fish, Stanley. 1997. *Surprised by Sin*, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP.

Jonson, Ben. 1996. *Collected Poems*. Edited by George Parfitt. London: Penguin.

Milton, John. 1957. *Complete Poems and Major Prose*. Edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Macmillan.

Sidney, Philip. 1999. *A Defense of Poetry*. Edited by Jan Van Dorsten. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Spenser, Edmund. 2001. *The Faerie Qveene*. Edited by Albert Charles Hamilton. Harlow: Longman.

Tennessee State Board of Education. 2018. *Tennessee English*/*Language Arts Standards*. Nashville: Tennessee State Board of Education.

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