“Our God is a God of surprises”: The Mystery of God in Dante’s Writings

This article asserts Pope Francis’s Easter 2018 comments on God’s surprising ways would have been appreciated by Dante Alighieri, who portrays God’s unpredictableness in Il Convivio, De Monarchia, and the “Letter to Can Grande.” It then reads Dante’s Commedia in light of these treatises, analyzing instances of the unexpected in the epic—from punished popes to redeemed reprobates to almost absent theological authorities. The article concludes that Dante’s assumptions about God are rooted principally in Catholic theology concerning the mystery of God, although they likely owe a debt to the poet’s sense of the literary tradition and political situation as well.