Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry

2. All Smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante's Commedia

2 All Smiles Po etry and Theo lo gy in Dante’s C ommedia P E T E R S . H AW K I N S Milton dubbed Edmund Spenser “our sage and serious poet,” praising him as a better teacher about virtue and vice than “Scotus or Aquinas.”1 Literary history subsequently transferred this laurel crown to Dante, who continues to be read, translated, and reimagined by modern writers to a degree that has eluded the author of The Faerie Queene.2 “Sage and serious,” however, is not a tag to be accepted lightly. It comes with baggage—the earnest expectation of instruction and the prospect of tedium . No one, of course, could bring this charge against Inferno. Horace Walpole might despise Dante as “extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in Bedlam”; Nietzsche might disdain him as a “hyena that writes poetry in tombs”; but has anyone ever found his Hell a bore?3 There is too much passion, too much demonic mischief to enjoy: mud wrestling among the wrathful (Inf. 8.52–60), a demon’s fart as call to arms (Inf. 21.139), and a malicious put-down of Virgil by an ironic hypocrite with attitude (Inf. 23.142–44). Once one is past the excitement of Inferno, however, two-thirds of the poem remains, and in that stretch of sixty-six cantos is a slew of philosophical and theological longueurs—a surplus of virtue—that in sheer accumulation can be dauntingly “sage and serious.” Paradiso in particular seems to defy pleasure with dense passages of non-poesia, famously despaired over by Benedetto Croce. There is Beatrice delivering herself on moon spots (Par. 2), for instance, or, in her magisterial role as theologian, giving the rationale for the Incarnation (Par. 7). Too much information— 36 and all of it, despite the Commedia’s title, apparently at the farthest remove from a laugh or a smile. Yet such non-poesia passages contain flashes of humor, which often yield remarkable insights into what Dante is centrally up to in his poem. An example is the apparent throwaway line in Purgatorio 29, “Giovanni è meco,” in which Dante adjudicates between two biblical visionaries. Exactly how many wings have the creatures that accompany the griffindrawn chariot in the pageant of revelation? The poet tells us that what he saw on the other side of Lethe was what Ezekiel describes at the opening of his prophecy, except that when it comes to the number of their wings—a total of six, not four—“Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte” (105) [ John’s with me / as to their wings; with him, John disagrees]. In other words, John the Divine gets it right not because a New Testament seer takes in more of the truth than an Old Testament prophet but because his Apocalypse accords with the Commedia. John is with the poet, and Dante’s vision has the last word. What can the observant reader do in the face of such chutzpah but smile? Another such moment of truth occurs in the Primum Mobile, in Paradiso 28.4 First, the larger setting: twice in the heaven of the fixed stars, as Dante and Beatrice rotate in the constellation of Gemini, the pilgrim looks down from his lofty vantage in the material universe to behold the seven concentric planetary spheres just traversed. From the Stellatum in the eighth heaven, therefore, he peers down at Saturn, Jupiter , Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon—only to see at the center of this cosmos “l’aiuola” [the little threshing floor] of our world. Noting how small and insignificant it seems from the perspective of the heavens, “io sorrisi del suo vil sembiante” (22.135) [I smiled at its scrawny image]. When Dante next ascends to the Primum Mobile, he looks into Beatrice ’s eyes—as he has done throughout his paradisiacal ascent—and beholds a dazzling version of this planetary Chinese box. He sees, however , the addition of a ninth, outermost circle. Presumably, this represents the ninth sphere, the Primum Mobile, in which he now rotates. Again, the center he beholds, reflected first in Beatrice’s eyes and then in the sphere all around him, is immobile; but whereas before, the nine circles revolved faster and faster as they moved outward toward the tenth sphere, that of the Empyrean, now the circle closest to the center moves with the greatest speed. The revolutions of the others slow as distance from the...