Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry

5. Liturgical Personhood: Creation, Penitence, and Praise in the Commedia

5 Liturgical Personhood Creation, Penitence, and Praise in the Commedia M AT T H E W T R E H E R N E To speak of “liturgical personhood” is to draw a link between liturgical practice and subjectivity that requires careful formulation. The notion that liturgy might in some sense shape personhood, while not new, has been sharpened over the last fifteen years or so in theological studies. Scholars have addressed—often in highly sophisticated ways—the manner in which liturgical performance can be seen, not as empty formula or inert ritual, but rather as a rich mode of religious language, which establishes complex relationships between the subject engaged in liturgical performance, the God to whom liturgy is offered, and the words of the liturgy itself. Catherine Pickstock, for instance, offers a rich analysis of the late medieval mass, which emphasizes the ways in which it leads the participant to experience the contrast of time and eternity, and shifts between different types of utterances—constative, performative, selfreferential , and doxological—none of which predominates.1 As a result of this modulation, a particular type of human agency emerges which is neither wholly active nor fully passive.2 In a Heideggerian vein, JeanYves Lacoste argues that liturgy is best understood as a field of action and a site of distinctive experience. Liturgy is, he argues, “tout ce qui incarne la relation de l’homme à Dieu. . . . La liturgie est en effet ce concept qui nous interdit la dissociation ruineuse de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur , du ‘corps’ et de l’‘âme’” [all that embodies the relationship of man to God. . . . Liturgy is indeed the concept which forbids us from making a ruinous dissociation of interior and exterior, of “body” and “soul”].3 131 Such strongly stated accounts warn us against any temptation to write off liturgy as a merely decorative, exterior practice.4 At the same time that the implications of liturgy for religious practice are being reexamined in theological studies, Dante scholarship is increasingly acknowledging the importance of liturgy to the Commedia,5 although the focus has been primarily on the penitential aspects of the liturgical performances of Purgatorio, and the relevance of certain aspects of religious practice—in particular, the sacraments—to Dante’s poem remains contested.6 If we are willing to engage with the claims of theologians such as Pickstock and Lacoste, we must entertain the possibility that the liturgical performances Dante describes in the Commedia are not merely an add-on, nor simply part of the “coloring” of the poem; rather, they might be theologically significant in their own right. Indeed, there are very good textual reasons to take Dante’s presentation of the liturgy seriously. In his account of Purgatory, the very presence of liturgy marks an innovation with regard to the view of Purgatory that had emerged in late medieval culture. (According to Aquinas, for instance, the souls of Purgatory had no need to pray at all.)7 This innovation stands alongside a number of other strikingly original aspects of Dante’s Purgatory . These include the physical structure of Purgatory, which figures the movement of the souls as a movement towards the Earthly Paradise and thus towards the condition of prelapsarian humanity in Eden; and— through the principle of vice, which informs the division of Purgatory proper into seven terraces and underlies the processes of purgation that Dante describes—the importance of psychological change. It is my contention that these innovations are closely tied with Dante’s presentation of liturgy in the Commedia. In particular, I wish to show that the restoration of the proper relationship between creature and creator is central to this presentation, and that the movement of souls to God is suggested through a consistent set of references to the sacramental and through a shift in liturgical performance towards praise, a shift that takes place throughout Purgatory and is fulfilled in Paradise. Liturgy, Personhood, and Createdness in PURGATORIO A subtle but important distinction must be drawn between the liturgical performances witnessed by the pilgrim in Ante-Purgatory and those 132 MATTHEW TREHERNE of Purgatory proper, a distinction which helps alert us to Dante’s concerns in presenting liturgy in Purgatorio. In Ante-Purgatory—a place where “tempo per tempo si ristora” (Purg. 23.84) [restitution comes to time through time], with its emphases on waiting rather than on moral change—liturgical performances are closely related...