Dante's Commedia: Theology as Poetry

9. Neoplatonic Metaphysics and Imagination in Dante’s Commedia

9 Neoplatonic Metaphysics and Imagination in Dante’s Commedia D O U G L A S H E D L E Y It must puzzle us to know what thinking is if Shakespeare and Dante did not do it. —Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination Readers often find an image of their own longings in the works of great poets. Dante, for example, exerts considerable sway over those, like T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers, who see him as a representative of a lost Christendom—the Catholic poet par excellence. Others, like Benedetto Croce, have played down the theology and exalted the aesthetic component of Dante’s achievement. My aim in the present essay is to highlight the Neoplatonic aspect of Dante’s aesthetics, which later flourished in the Romantic period, one of the two modern periods in which Neoplatonism was an intellectually dominant force in the West.1 I further suggest that this aesthetics is linked to a rather surprising aspect of Neoplatonism : its emphasis on the indwelling divine spirit. My starting point is that Dante gives us an astonishingly articulate account of his own creative imagination, located within a particular relation between prophecy and art, and deeply indebted to Neoplatonic metaphysics. This is an ontology of the “image” or “icon,” in which the sensible cosmos is viewed as a likeness of the intelligible reality that is its source. The imagination itself is an instance of that force of the divine 245 within humanity, awoken by heavenly eros, which arouses the longing to return to the divine origin: Non dei più ammirar, se bene stimo, lo tuo salir, se non come d’un rivo se d’alto monte scende giuso ad imo. Maraviglia sarebbe in te se, privo d’impedimento, giù ti fossi assiso, com’ a terra quïete in foco vivo. (Par. 1.136–41) [If I am right, thou shouldst no more wonder at thy ascent than at a stream falling from a mountain-height to the foot; it would be a wonder in thee if, freed from hindrance, thou hadst remained below, as on earth would be stillness in living flame.] We find here the Neoplatonic tenet that when the soul is liberated from evil, it ascends quite naturally to the Good: omnia in deum tendunt et recurrunt. This metaphor of the natural place of the soul in God or its gravitation towards the One is employed by Christian theologians of Neoplatonic provenance, such as Eriugena and Eckhart.2 This doctrine of the indwelling divine power was not a gloomy determinism. Precisely on account of their conviction that the divine was immanent in the human soul, for instance, the Neoplatonists of Renaissance Florence believed that the artes liberales are properly so called because they free and thereby enlarge the mind through the awakening and inspiring light of divine presence. A Neoplatonic construal of Dante is not a cultural oddity but based upon an elective affinity. Romantic Neoplatonists such as Coleridge or Schelling saw, I believe, a congenial spirit in Dante—and in this essay I will suggest why they were correct.3 At the core of such a belief in a genial coincidence is a paradoxical insistence on the transcendence and the immanence of the divine, on estrangement from and intimacy with God. The crucial verb, in Dantean terms, is “trasumanar” (Par. 1.70): to transhumanize. The Commedia has a triadic structure expressive of the transformation, purification, and spiritualization of love as the soul ascends to God through the three stages of alienation, purgation, and contemplative union. This might well strike one as being in contrast with a common image of “Platonism,” often attributed to Dante. Emphasis upon the “presence” 246 DOUGLAS HEDLEY of the divine contrasts with the widely diffused image of the “great chain of being,” where the emphasis lies rather upon the immeasurable dignity and transcendence of the divine source. Yet such a powerful sense of divine immanence as opposed to some radical and inaccessible transcendence is central to Neoplatonic thought. As beautifully expressed by Coleridge, “Dante does not so much elevate your thoughts as send them down deeper. In this canto all images are distinct, and even vividly distinct; but there is a total impression of infinity; the wholeness is not in vision or conception, but in an inner feeling of totality, and absolute being.”4 Modern scholars of Dante have shared this sentiment. Christopher Ryan observes that...