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MLN 115.1 (2000) 1-12



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Closure in Paradise:
Dante Outsings Aquinas

Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle


The architectonic model of Dante's Commedia as a Gothic cathedral 1 is rivaled by Aquinas's Summa theologiae, as if the works were the twin spires of medievalism. Yet it cannot be that "Dante's cosmic poem is such a summa too" 2 because Aquinas's Summa was never summed. The exemplarity of the medieval mind as systematic falters on Aquinas's failure to complete his project. He abruptly ceased writing and dictating his masterpiece in part three at question ninety, on penance. When pressed by his confessor to explain his indolence, he replied, "I cannot, because everything I have written seems to me chaffy, in respect to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me." 3 Aquinas's silence was not respected. Unfinished works, even fragments, were a bane of medieval literature. 4 Dominican editors covered his shame by completing the Summa theologiae [End Page 1] posthumously with a scissors-and-paste job from his Summa contra gentiles. Apocryphal stories were invented about Aquinas's miraculous recovery from ineffability: how he dictated to the monks at Fossa Nova from his deathbed a commentary on the Song of Songs. 5 A century ago the abbot of Montecassino claimed an astounding discovery in the margins of an archival manuscript: a final work by Aquinas, a monograph letter to his predecessor on future contingents. 6 Modern biographers and scholars still resolutely mistranslate his judgment of "chaffy" as "strawy," ruining his meaning by converting bad to good. 7 But Aquinas knew the difference: the chaff was the useless husks separated during threshing from the straw, the useful stalk or stem of cereal grains. As he explained, chaff was stuff fit for burning only, like sinners in hell. 8

Dante assessed Aquinas's repudiation of his work with utter sobriety. Since he himself had experienced incompletion with his Convivio, 9 the accomplishment of his Commedia was an imperative. Just as Aquinas's decision not to write had been prompted by a vision, so was Dante's inspiration to write. The "mirabile visione" that had suspended La vita nuova would be resumed as the Commedia. 10 In its final canto the pilgrim penetrates the eternal light to a vision of its source. "Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna / legato con amore in un volume, / ciò che per l'universo si squaderna . . . (In its depth I saw ingathered, bound by love in a single volume, that which is dispersed [End Page 2] in leaves throughout the universe . . .)." 11 The completion of his Commedia, the publication of which Dante experienced serially, required a hermeneutical act. He invested the final step in the process of bookmaking, its binding, with a significance privileged to authors who supervised the production of their own copies. Its sequential meaning was ordered by its simultaneous meaning, so that without this final canto to bind the book its action could not be comprehended as completed in God. 12

Aquinas, whose Summa theologiae was also published in fascicules, did not achieve with his own part three the binding of the book. Yet the critical consensus has supposed that his role in Dante's cantica three is simply to lecture the pilgrim on the necessary intellectual procedure toward beatitude. Aquinas's allusions in Paradiso to the shipwreck of Ulysses and the faltering of Daedalus are thus intended as warnings against rash pride in venturing into unknown areas. 13 These very positive assessments of Aquinas's character miss the fact that he speaks about failure from personal experience. Dante confers upon Aquinas posthumously and fictionally the voice that failed him in life and reality. His speech begins emphatically and self-consciously by announcing itself, as Aquinas "ruppe il silenzio . . . e disse (broke the silence . . . and said)." It commences significantly with the metaphor of threshing straw to garner its grain. "Quando l'una paglia è trita, / quando la sua semenza è già riposta, / a batter l'altra dolce amor m'invita. (Since one straw is threshed, since its grain is now...

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