Defaming Dante

Among the fourteen criteria that according to Italo Calvino help us recognize a classic we find the sentence: "I classici sono libri che esercitano un'influenza particolare sia quando s'impongono come indimenticabili, sia quando si nascondono nelle pieghe della memoria mimetizzandosi da inconscio collettivo o individuale." It is true that in his short explications of the fourteen criteria Calvino does not mention Dante's Divine Comedy, yet the long history of its reception leaves no doubt that the quoted—third—criterion perfectly matches the poem. It is well known that, in the Renaissance as well as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, readers searched in it for guidance, in particular as far as a (morally and socially) good life was concerned. The Romantics appreciated in Dante both the passionate lover and the socially and politically committed poet who managed to put up with many difficulties and, despite many obstacles, remained faithful to his beliefs. Later, in the aftermath of World War I, deeply disorientated German writers, academics, and intellectuals turned to the author of the Comedy as a model for how to keep up with high moral standards during political and social turmoil. Although the exaggerated cult of Dante has always triggered ironic comments, and some attempts to turn the Florentine poet into a German provoked raised eyebrows in contemporaries such as Victor Klemperer, it is only around the turn of the century that the problematic side of such identificatory moral readings of the poem have come into focus.

On the one hand, in a very compelling way Matthew Pearl, for instance, traces in his 2003 novel The Dante Club the extent to which the desire to model one's life and behavior on the pilgrim Dante's journey through the three realms of the afterlife proves ambiguous. The murders committed by a traumatized veteran of the Civil War are based on a pathological identification with parts of Dante's fiction of Divine Justice. Yet Pearl's thriller does not jump to the conclusion that Dante classes or the reading of his poem more generally should be abolished. The story of the murderer's too-literal understanding is counterbalanced by the members of Longfellow's Dante Club who manage to retrieve and live the Comedy as a linguistically, culturally, and most of all humanly enriching experience (which includes the uncovering of the murderer).

On the other hand, the Divine Comedy—like so many other great books of world literature—has ended up being strongly questioned by human rights organizations. In 2012, the Italian NGO Gherush92 publicly asserted that the Comedy, that is to say the very text that for centuries has been acclaimed as a masterpiece of humanity, is deeply racist, Islamophobic, and antisemitic. They requested that the study of the Comedy no longer be a central part of the Italian school curriculum. They pinpointed a number of offensive passages. First of all, the way in which Dante featured the prophet Mohammed and Ali is said to be highly offensive for a Muslim pupil. The same goes for Dante's representation of Judas, the Jew who betrayed Christ, which enhances the country's already perilously growing antisemitism. Finally, Dante's depiction of homosexuals in Hell would be discriminatory because it claims that they have sinned against God's created nature. Incidentally, the Gherush92 report skips the fact that Dante does not in fact exclude all homosexuals from accessing Paradise, as some of them are allowed to purge themselves in the very fire that also cleans heterosexuals who overindulged in their corporeal desires.

It comes as no surprise that the report met with strong opposition in Italy—and that it did not bring about any change in the school curriculum. The British journalist Alison Flood ends her article about why the Divine Comedy is criticized for being "offensive and discriminatory" by quoting Maurizio Cucchi and Giulio Ferroni, who "called the comments 'another frenzy of political correctness, combined with an utter lack of historical sense.'"¹ Although both are firmly convinced of the many "benefits to be gained from reading and studying the Divine Comedy," they advise that the problematic biases in Dante's...