Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry

1. Polemics of Praise: Theology as Text, Narrative, and Rhetoric in Dante's Commedia

1 Polemics of Praise Theo lo gy as Text, Narrative, and Rheto ric in Dante’s Commedia R O B I N K I R K PAT R I C K Poetry, Propositions, Persons The conference from which this essay proceeds demonstrated a wide variety of ways in which theologians and literary critics may collaborate. Dante’s Commedia provided a natural focus for and encouragement to such collaboration. At the same time, the debate unsettled any easy assumptions about the relationship between theological and literary discussion . As quickly became apparent, it could not proceed fruitfully in an atmosphere of pious confidence, as if there were some such thing as “poetry,” apart from specific texts and specific authors, betraying a religious dimension; or as if there were some such thing as “theology,” in some equally generic way free from metaphor or simile in its deliverances. The specific matters. And this is as true of the Commedia—for all its apparently universal aspirations—as of any other text. Dante is a poet. But he is his own kind of poet. He is not Henry Vaughan, nor John Donne, nor even a born-again Bob Dylan. Not only did Dante write a long time ago, he also brought—in theory as well as practice—a passionately selfconscious interest to bear upon poetic and indeed linguistic tradition, seeking, in an unmistakably experimental spirit, to redefine the received idea of poetic art and even, perhaps, of language itself. One of the reasons why Dante was so beloved of twentieth-century modernists is that they recognized how far we had strayed in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, 14 and Romantic phases of our cultural history from a full understanding of his example. And indeed Dante’s poem will deny us, at every point, any preconceived or lately conceived notion as to what poetry essentially is. In part, then, the purpose of the present essay is to insist upon the detail of Dante’s text, and (in outline at least) upon the often polemical theory that is instantiated in that text. But this aim is also associated here with a specific—though very radical—question: Is it possible to make valid statements about the Divinity in terms of human language and human logic? At first, it might seem that the very title of this volume of essays—Dante’s “Commedia”: Theology as Poetry—already implies a response . Does such a title not assume that, whatever the validity of logical propositions may be, a poetic text—the Commedia, that is—may exemplify a language of religious discourse different from, but no less valid than, the language of ratiocination? But then, by reputation, the Commedia might be thought to take an especially confident view of how propositions and poetry can be reconciled—and this impression seems to gather strength in the perspective of Dante’s Scholastic inheritance. These initial considerations lead to a range of questions concerning the conception of the human person and the peculiar status that poets might be supposed to claim as prophets or scribes of the divine—and, indeed, the even more peculiar status of professional scholars, who fill their works, days, and bibliographies with well-judged deliverances and propositions about the workings of revelation. Poetry, propositions, persons : this alliterative mnemonic calls for theoretical nuance. If, in Dante’s phrase, the poet grows “macro” (Par. 25.3) [gaunt] in the service of heavenly and earthly truth, then what is his “person” if not an epicenter of self-denial? And if that is what our poet tells us about persons, what right have we—as his commentators—to grow fat on the textual proceeds? To put it another way: Is there any form of professional procedure—in theology or in literary criticism—in which we might willingly abandon the securities of second-order discourse—ever judicious, ever neutral— in favor of those dangerous waters of first-order discourse, where the heady confession of ignorance is as likely to be revealing as our learned footnotes? As the second part of my essay’s title suggests, I wish to propose that both poetry and theology are better realized in a detailed engagement with texts and historical situations than in any pursuit of vision or theoretical system. On this view, close reading, or practical criticism, seems Polemics of Praise 15 a very Dantean way to truth. And pursuing this view also allows...