Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry

6. Dante’s Commedia and the Body of Christ

6 Dante’s Commedia and the Body of Christ O L I V E R D AV I E S The systematic theologian inevitably approaches a theological poet such as Dante with a certain amount of trepidation and, hopefully, with some caution. After all, to read a literary text as theology (as though it were theology?) is to cross a boundary that resonates at many different levels. There is, first, the question of genre, and second, that of intent. Do we read literary texts with the same kinds of expectations with which we read theological ones? What kind of reading does the literary or theological text itself promote? (We are speaking here of traditions of reading which any tutored reader will already inhabit, but there is a sense nevertheless in which we can say that a text “calls out” to be read in a certain way, on account of subtle signs and forms of organization on and below the surface of the text.) On the face of it, theological and literary texts need to be read in different ways: the former communicate ideas, clarify, and instruct— although some theology will also develop the expressivity of certain thematic and doctrinal topoi; the latter may also communicate ideas, clarify, and instruct, but will tend to do so in the light of the autonomy of the text itself. Crudely stated, we may legitimately request of the theologian some account of what they mean at any particular point in their text—there is immediate responsibility here for what is communicated—while the poet will or may turn the request back to the text itself. No theologian worth their salt would set out to complicate their thought in such a way and to such an extent that the reader interpretively struggles, as with a 161 literary text, to determine exactly what are the ideas being communicated by the author. The literary text, on the other hand, stands as an end in itself; however rich its readings and resonances, there has to be a sense in which the form of the literary work of art cannot be dissolved into conceptual systems of communication without at that point stepping out of what we ordinarily understand to be the act of reading literature— whereby we give ourselves over to the text, and allow it, for the duration of the reading and sometimes long afterwards, to be our world. That said, these initial, cautious thoughts are complicated by the far-reaching crossover between theology and literature in the modern period, which suggests that theology must in fact learn the indirectness of the literary text if it is properly going to be able to communicate what must be communicated—something so elemental and primary that it simply cannot be communicated in any other way but indirectly. (Such a view of the theological text is outrightly modern, belonging to early Romanticism in general and to one of the greatest figures of that period, Søren Kierkegaard, in particular.)1 So how should a systematic theologian read Dante’s Commedia? The initial answer to this must of course be “as literature.” And if we did not read it in that way, then perhaps we would not be reading it at all. Surely, if we want to come to grips with Scholastic theology, then we would best look at Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologiae and not at Dante, for whom, in this respect at least, Thomas is a “source.” But while it may be fascinating to discern where the influence of Thomas in Dante may lie, such an interpretive exercise is not in itself theology: it is the business of tracking Dante’s theological sources for sensible historical purposes. There is clearly more than that to reading Dante’s Commedia “as theology .” The approach characterized in this essay is thus entirely other than the tracking of sources (though perhaps we will do a little of that); but nor does it simply aim to offer a literary understanding of Dante’s text qua literature (although I hope it will not be too unsubtle in this regard ). It is, rather, an approach that presupposes the centrality of both theology and literariness in the reading of Dante’s text. The approach to Dante’s Commedia presented here takes the act of reading—the act of reading this text—to be already caught up in the nature of the text itself, in such a way that to read it from a perspective which is not...