Dante v. Theology? Theologization, “Detheologization,” and Innovation

Scholarship on Dante’s theology has enjoyed a remarkable proliferation in recent decades, moving beyond harsh polarities toward an increasingly wide-ranging community of readers in close dialogue. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, theological studies of Dante were indeed polarized by sharp debates between such figures as Giovanni Busnelli, who found in Dante a strict disciple of Thomas Aquinas, and Bruno Nardi, who emphasized Dante’s Neoplatonism, his debts to Albertus Magnus, and, more broadly, his eclecticism.Footnote ¹⁰ While these debates became more nuanced and more amicable with the emergence of critics like Etienne Gilson and the Dominican Kenelm Foster, questions of Dante’s philosophical theology and intellectual formation continued to prevail.Footnote ¹¹ Within American Dante studies Charles Singleton stressed Thomism as particularly formative among the theological traditions shaping the view of the Commedia; and Robert Hollander, like Singleton, investigated the dynamic identity of Dante as “Theologus Poeta,” with special attention to the workings of theological allegory and the presence of antique literature within the Commedia.Footnote ¹² John Freccero, a student of Singleton’s, approached the poem with a lively Augustinian hermeneutic, interpreting many central difficulties in the poem as illuminated with reference to the theological imagery of Augustine of Hippo.Footnote ¹³

In the latter decades of the twentieth century, however, two influential literary readers of Dante, Harold Bloom, and Teodolinda Barolini, developed more agonistic hermeneutics for understanding the theological dynamics of the poem. Bloom, viewing Dante as a poet without peer in the canon of Western literature, and Barolini, working within the more specialized approaches and contexts of Italian literature, have continually offered strong readings of Dante that emphasize his poetic virtuosity and the oppositional dynamics between his genius and his alleged Christianity, both perpetuating the image of the proud Dante by emphasizing the rhetorical artifice at the heart of his poetic strategy. These two readers, while not “theological” in a traditional sense, have offered serious theological challenges that provoke some of the arguments of this book. Barolini’s work, however, serves as a particular goad and inspiration for the readings offered here. Profoundly and admirably engaged with Dante’s textuality, i.e., with the strategies of self-authentication and the theological and ideological implications that emerge from the text of the Commedia, Barolini has consistently urged readers of Dante to turn their attention to the “crucible” where Dante’s poetry and theology coincide. To “detheologize” Dante, by Barolini’s account, is thus not to strip away its theology, but rather to release our reading of it from the author’s hermeneutic imperatives, lest they overdetermine our grasp of its meaning and its magnificence. Barolini in this sense pits “the ideology of the form” against ideological content, emphasizing the ideological gap that exists between the “how” and the “what” of the poem, so that what appears theologically limpid on the surface is endlessly and profoundly subjected to the fabulous artifice of the poem’s mimetic strategies.Footnote ¹⁴ Barolini’s formalistic attention has yielded potent readings of the Commedia that challenge conventional or naïve assumptions about Dante’s theology, as well as assumptions of his traditionalism in other areasFootnote ¹⁵: For example, her analyses of Beatrice as a hyperreal, erudite, voluble “Beatrice loquax” have offered just ripostes to criticism that assumes Dante’s misogyny, as well as to longstanding assumptions that Beatrice ought to be regarded primarily as allegorical.Footnote ¹⁶

In Barolini’s work, one often encounters the concern that Dante must be rescued from the theologians standing ready to monopolize interpretation of Dante’s work, or perhaps to exploit it toward their own ideological ends. Such a concern recognizes rightly that theological readings have the potential to be sit heavily on what Barolini calls the poem’s “lightness,” its lively, imaginative newness; and Barolini’s readings indeed offer perspectives on Dante that are extraordinarily enlivening, endeavoring as though to scrape away the barnacles of traditional interpretation and expose the luster of Dante’s work.Footnote ¹⁷ The recent Oxford Handbook of Dante, too, aims to destabilize traditional hermeneutics – including theological approaches – that have at times exercised excessive control, without acknowledgment of their positionality. It collects a wide range of essays, taking diverse approaches across disciplinary and global perspectives, that explore the openness and porosity of Dante’s work.Footnote ¹⁸

Here again, one might wonder: What might then be the use of another theological reading of the Commedia? This question arises not only because of the formidable body of literature already dedicated to the subject, but also because Christian theological traditions have often worked oppressively: against the liveliness of literature, against vulnerable people within Christian communities, and against the Other in their midst, against difference and dissent. The Second Crusade, the Wars of Religion, the violent history of anti-Semitism and of colonization of native lands are only a few notorious examples in a dark legacy of Christianity’s deployment to destructive ends. Barolini’s concern, to put it modestly, is understandable.

To read Dante theologically, however, may be something other than a concession to this dark history; it may be instead a way of drawing out a story of personal transformation and liberation, particularly when focused through the paradoxically liberating conception of humility within Christian thought. Dante and the Practice of Humility in this sense builds upon the towering achievements of research into Dante’s theology – a body of work that begins with the poem’s earliest commentators – while endeavoring to approach Dante’s theology somewhat differently. Like Barolini, I regard the Commedia as voluble, resistant to simplistic ideological frameworks, speaking afresh; so in these readings, I offer interpretations of the poem that demonstrate its theological eloquence, showing how it “speaks” theologically to present concerns. To think of the Commedia as thus constructive, as theologically alive, is only possible because of the vast scholarship already in existence, without which a book like this would be impossible.

Perhaps unlike Barolini, however, I perceive within Christian theological traditions rich resources for “lightness,” for enormous creativity and continual newness, in the perennial practice of returning to the first testimonies of the life of Christ, and interpreting them over and again for new communities and contexts. For Barolini, theological invention seems often to be regarded as necessarily heterodox and thus destabilizing, as though theology insists on a monolithic stasis.Footnote ¹⁹ This book, however, conceives of the practice of theology rather differently. The early gospel accounts offer stories that attest to transforming liberation as the central event of Christian faith, and their canonical centrality to Scripture and to Christian literature has served as a call to reform and renewal in countless generations, particularly in response to such horrific abuses of Christian teaching as those sketched above. For the gospels attest that the founding teachings and the founding narrative of Christianity had the immediate effect of liberating and transforming those who encountered it; it was not given as an oppressive edifice, crushing those in its path, but as a message of startling upheaval, and it was first given to people who were themselves on the margins of society. And to bring that idea to bear on human reality has, from the beginning, called for tremendous creativity.

It may sound paradoxical to suggest that theological creativity is in fact highly traditional. Yet from its origins in four narrative gospels, often dissonant themselves, the practice of Christian theology has always been extraordinarily miscellaneous, taking the form of sermons and letters offering contextual teaching as often as more elevated genres, such as treatises, sentences, and Summae; manifesting in manifold, even contradictory interpretations of Scriptural passages, often by a single author; tolerating multiple theological emphases, even as those most central tenets of faith – Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection – receive privileged treatment, being repeated in creeds and celebrated in major feasts of the church year. The Christian churches, quite reasonably, have a reputation for suppressing dissonance; but that reputation belies their origins as well as their extreme internal diversity. It fails to take account of the ways in which Christian theologians have always been engaged in creative work, turning to a range of philosophical, Scriptural, classical, and anecdotal resources, and offering endless innovations within theological traditions.

A better way to understand Christian theology, and, in particular, Dante’s theology, might begin from quite a different assumption, i.e., that theology is itself a creative practice. In Zygmunt Barański’s assessment, Dante’s approach to theology can be characterized as “innovation from within the tradition”Footnote ²⁰; I would add, however, that Christian theological traditions themselves tell a story of innovation.Footnote ²¹ In that light, understanding the theology of the Commedia need not be exclusively a matter of studying Dante’s formation and context, though such studies are invaluable; it is, crucially, a matter of reading the Commedia and endeavoring to understand what the poem is doing. Taken in this rather different light, Barolini’s now classic imperative, to look at the “how” of the Commedia – at what the poem is doing, at how the poem is working – can inspire an approach to the poem that is both literary and theological, one that takes up Barolini’s challenge to confront the creative “crucible” of poetry and theology; and to explore creativity and theology as tightly intertwined, richly synergetic forces within the Commedia.

The Landscape of Recent Scholarship

Deeply held assumptions sometimes persist well beyond the point at which counter-examples begin to present themselves. To wit: in the past two decades, we have seen new researches into a wide range of contexts for understanding Dante’s theology, offering advances that go well beyond the theological naïveté that Barolini has justifiably resisted, and often complicating the narrative I have outlined above. These readers are drawn from a range of disciplines and departments and represent a markedly collaborative and interdisciplinary ethos toward the study of Dante. This emerging community of readers has made it possible to understand Dante’s Commedia as taking shape “against the panorama of the entire canon,” in Peter Hawkins’ words, and within the cultural, liturgical, and political pageantry of medieval religion.Footnote ²² Within this wealth of new resources, readers have found ways to discover Dante’s theology anew, through both historical and textual investigations.

Several recent collaborations allow us to trace these readers and their diverse approaches to the poem in broad constellation. I use the terms “interpretive” and “historicizing” here in order to bring to bear two distinctive approaches to understanding Dante’s theology, often congenial and overlapping, but nonetheless different in their emphases on text (“interpretive”) and context (“historicizing”). The volume Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry (2010), emerging from a conference in Cambridge (UK) that invited Dante scholars and theologians together in reflection on the poem, offers richly interpretive work emphasizing not only the many fragments of theological traditions presenting themselves in the poem, but also developing the possibilities for “active and constructive relationships” among such fragments. Essays offer a range of doctrinal, philosophical, and contextual perspectives on the poem and, particularly in work by Montemaggi, Hawkins, and Robin Kirkpatrick, reflect on the theological relationship between the poem’s form and content.Footnote ²³ By contrast to Barolini, these formalistic approaches often find ways to harmonize form with content, discovering theological value in formal elements that enrich and enact theological understanding. The two volumes of Reviewing Dante’s Theology (2013), emerging from a workshop at the Leeds Center for Dante Studies, provide a timely review of the current state of research into Dante’s theology, offering broad assessments of the achievements of modern scholarship into Dante’s theology. These volumes reflect a historizing approach, including chapters on major theological figures influencing Dante’s thought, discrete theological questions and modes significant to Dante’s work, and the cultural and intellectual contexts for those questions and modes. Particularly magisterial are contributions by Zygmunt Barański and Simon Gilson, who offer valuable genealogies of theological Dante scholarship on the questions of doctrine and orthodoxy (Barański) and on Christian Aristotelianism (Gilson); and by Ronald L. Martinez, whose illuminating essay on the dauntingly vast liturgical context for Dante’s poem digests an impressive body of research.Footnote ²⁴ These volumes reflect a growing sense of Dante’s theology and intellectual formation as essentially syncretic, while embracing newer scholarly movements toward reading Dante as strongly concerned with theological sources beyond the scholastic tradition, such as Scripture, liturgy, biblical commentary, preaching, and monastic life.Footnote ²⁵ As George Ferzoco emphasizes in his essay on the context of preaching, Dante is with increasing frequency presented as influenced by and himself contributing to emerging genres of “vernacular theology,” communicated to lay audiences and readers in their own language by both religious and lay authors, and often employing the visual and liturgical culture of the church for the purpose.Footnote ²⁶

Other projects giving evidence of the expanding horizons of theologically engaged work on Dante include recent volumes of proceedings from the Convegno internazionale di Studi in Ravenna, reflecting on subjects such as the tense intratextual relationships between poetry, prayer, and liturgy, or poetry and prophecy, in Dante’s poem; the three volumes of Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (2016–2018), originating in a four-year series of lectures in Cambridge (UK), again drawing many theologians and theologically-minded Dantisti into dialogue; and the volume Dante, Mercy, and the Beauty of the Human Person (2017), resulting from a University of Notre Dame lecture series and pursing a broadly “interpretive” and constructive approach to the poem.Footnote ²⁷ This final volume is framed as a response to Pope Francis’s call to read the Commedia “as a true pilgrimage,” in anticipation of the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016, a call that itself tacitly recommends an “interpretive” approach to the theology of the poem. Most recently, the aforementioned Oxford Handbook offers many fresh interpretive perspectives on Dante’s religious and theological production.Footnote ²⁸

These multi authored volumes, and the broad, interdisciplinary networks of scholars whose work they present, have outlined the bright landscape of current research into the theology of Dante’s Commedia, and the “interpretive” and “historicizing” approaches within this area of investigation. This is to say nothing, however, of single-authored works that have shaped and inspired this book. Aside from Barolini, three theologically engaged readers of Dante, each of them tending toward the “interpretive” approach, have been particularly influential, and I remain in dialogue with them throughout. In Dante’s Testaments, Peter Hawkins explores the poet’s canonicity as the potent source of Dante’s formation, and thus of the formation of the Commedia. Particularly with reference to the Bible, Hawkins considers the tense relationship between Dante’s literary debts and deference (to the Bible, to theological traditions, to monasticism and liturgy) and his audacious self-authorization as a poet, exposing this profoundly “both/and” dynamic within the text: on the one hand, its biblical and theological claims, prayers, and praises; and, on the other, its dazzling artifice, its sheer moxie. The challenge implicit in Hawkins’ work to reconcile these always apparently irreconcilable impulses within the poem thus particularly animates this book’s meditations on Christian artistry.Footnote ²⁹

Robin Kirkpatrick’s work, secondly, has continually reflected on the Commedia as a linguistic, narrative, Christian performance, taking seriously Dante’s claim in Paradiso that the action of composing the poem has “made [him] lean” (Par. 25.3) and thus drawing attention to the ways in which poetry is, for Dante, a kind of askesis. In contrast to Barolini’s formalistic approach, Kirkpatrick’s formalism is founded on the assumption that Dante’s claims to veracity, and the explicit enunciation of his poetic limitations, are themselves the best guide to the poem, which eschews linguistic realism and its prideful breaches. Thus, for instance, the literary strategies of Inferno – particularly its linguistic and lexical difficulty, and its recourse to apophasis – must be understood as the strategies appropriate to the moral confusion of Inferno. Kirkpatrick’s work thus traces a thesis of moral and ascetic development in Dante’s poem as wrought by the exertions and constraints of language, a thesis undergirding his studies of Paradiso and Inferno and frequently explored in his commentary on and translation of the Commedia.Footnote ³⁰ For Kirkpatrick, both composition and content give indications that Dante is fallible, a sinner in via, whose poem marks that fallibility through both formal features and limpid ideological argument. This attention to the poem’s alternating notes of sin and salvation has shaped the way that I read the poem as, simultaneously, a virtuosic performance and a genuine spiritual exercise.

Vittorio Montemaggi, the last of my primary interlocutors, has continually identified pride and humility as central to Dante’s work, suggesting that Dante’s practices of penitence within the Commedia are themselves compositional practices. In Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology, Montemaggi explores the literary, theological, and spiritual implications of these practices, arguing that the formal features of Dante’s poem bear both the divine stamp of Christian love and the marks of fallibility, and that those signs mark the gradual progress of Dante’s spiritual transformation. His work has also reflected on the Commedia’s invitation to enter into the pilgrimage that it dramatizes. While Christian Moevs has made the case that the Commedia’s theology is central to the transformative experience that it invites, Montemaggi’s book takes this argument one step further, making the daring invitation to the poem’s readers and to scholars themselves to enter into loving, pilgrim relationships with it and with each other.Footnote ³¹ His work suggests the timeliness of a more comprehensive consideration of the role of humility in the Commedia, and of a reading method that considers Dante’s compositional practices and continually situates the reader in direct encounter with the poem.Footnote ³²

The Commedia on Pilgrimage: A Commentary

The method of this book takes cues from the “interpretive” readers that I have already mentioned, who emphasize the centrality of poetic form to Dante’s theology: By giving the poem a substantial and recurring presence in the book, I endeavor to tether sometimes legion theological interests to its form. Simultaneously it responds to another vein of conversation among Dante commentators concerning what Hawkins calls the “evangelical impulses” of the poem.Footnote ³³ The epistle to Dante’s patron Cangrande della Scala, long privileged as an interpretive key to the Commedia attributable to Dante’s own hand, declares that the poem’s intent is “to remove those living in a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness.”Footnote ³⁴ Such modes of interpretation of the Commedia have been explored in several recent studies of the ethical and moral structures of the poem and their reading implications; each of them, notably, uses one or more “historicizing” lenses in order to analyze Dante’s ethics. Marc Cogan’s The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the ‘Divine Comedy’ and its Meaning analyzes the structure of the Commedia against a broadly Thomistic background.Footnote ³⁵ Christian Moevs’ The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy links the poem’s metaphysical underpinnings with its poetics and purposes.Footnote ³⁶ Heather Webb’s Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman explores the Commedia’s concept of personhood and the attendant ethical modes developed via personal encounter, often with respect to monastic cultures and practices.Footnote ³⁷ Most recently, George Corbett’s Dante’s Christian Ethics: Purgatory and Its Moral Contexts considers Dante’s ethics on the basis of diverse criteria, including the Commedia’s narrative structure, scholastic influences, and lay and monastic contexts that offer insights into the poet’s broader vision. In particular, Corbett gives precedence to Dante’s personal status as a sinner and his adopted status as a vernacular preacher, both statuses that authenticate Dante’s ethical appeal to his reader to join him in the journey to salvation.Footnote ³⁸

Within this broader context of a turn toward the moral and ethical interpretation of the poem, the motif of pilgrimage has been invoked by a number of scholars as a way of tightening the interpretive relationship between the form of the poem, the situation of its author, and the demands that the poem places upon the reader. Others have discovered increasing textual clues from within the Commedia indicating the centrality of pilgrimage to its form and method. In the work of John Freccero, the process of Augustinian conversion and the assumption of spiritual progress are taken to be basic to the structure, form and even the meter of the poem.Footnote ³⁹ In his essay “Crossing Over: Dante and Pilgrimage,” Hawkins argues that the poem is conceived as “a pilgrimage text … written both to testify to a process already completed and to inspire others to undertake the same”; and, simultaneously, that the poem, by various methods, links Dante’s itinerary through the afterlife with contemporary practices of pilgrimage. Not least among these methods is the setting of the poem during Holy Week in the first Jubilee year of 1300, when Pope Boniface VIII offered Christians the option of a pilgrimage to Rome with the same spiritual rewards ordinarily reserved for pilgrimages to JerusalemFootnote ⁴⁰; but other passages, too, corroborate the poem’s interest in pilgrimages to Rome.Footnote ⁴¹ Elena Lombardi has explored themes of pilgrimage in her studies of love and desire in Dante’s work, often with reference to the thought of Augustine; her essay “Augustine and Dante,” for instance, focuses on the image of pilgrim desire at the opening of Purgatorio 8.Footnote ⁴² The authors contributing to Dante, Mercy and the Beauty of the Human Person collectively explore themes of pilgrimage in the Commedia, but Matthew Treherne is particularly attentive to ways in which the poem offers itself as a model of the human person in the midst of a moral journey, focusing especially on its liturgical markers of pilgrimage in Purgatorio.Footnote ⁴³ Like Kirkpatrick, Treherne has commented on the itinerant quality of the poem as itself on a kind of semantic pilgrimage, on a journey from misunderstanding to understanding.Footnote ⁴⁴ While Treherne’s discussion focuses on the changing uses of “Gloria,” Kirkpatrick has written more broadly of an ongoing linguistic drama in the poem, in which Dante, through the act of composition, and thus the poem itself, are engaged in a process of transformed language and redeemed understanding.Footnote ⁴⁵

Among these explorations of pilgrimage, Kirkpatrick’s sense of linguistic drama is most congenial to this book’s assertion that the process of transformation may not have been complete as Dante wrote, but was rather still underway. In this respect, Kirkpatrick and Barolini are surprisingly similar, in placing the poem’s dramatic tension at the center of interpretation, while also sharply disagreeing as to the source of that tension. For while Barolini emphasizes the masterful artifice of Dante the poet as dramatically opposing the humble transformation of Dante the pilgrim, Kirkpatrick approaches the composition of the poem as an extended act of askesis, in which the burden of composition actually grows lighter as the poem is constructed. Thus Barolini has criticized approaches to the Commedia that interpret the poetry and action of Inferno through the lens of sin, while interpreting the higher realms through a lens of redemption, ongoing (in Purgatorio) or complete (in Paradiso),Footnote ⁴⁶ and specifically criticizing the idea that the latter canticles give evidence of poetic humility.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such criticisms are salutary insofar as they ward off easy assumptions about the “completion” of Dante’s transformation; but in Kirkpatrick’s work, and in the view of this book, the sense of an ongoing askesis is hermeneutically central. Hence the title of this work applies even in the paradisial heights of the Celestial Rose: even there Dante’s humility is a matter of practice, of trial and error, ebb and flow, traceable in the poetry even as the poem aspires continually to reach new summits of perfection. The claim of this book is not that the poem or the poet achieves perfect humility, but rather that the poem increasingly discovers ways to practice humility, stooping in humility to participate in God’s higher art.

These explorations of the ways in which the poem is both concerned with pilgrimage and is itself “on pilgrimage” suggest that the genre of the poem might be fruitfully placed at the center of contemporary reflections upon it, and particularly so for theological reflection. Discussions of the poem’s genre have been wide-ranging, if far from conclusive: In the vast literature on this subject, we find much discussion of Dante’s genre-bending, and of the poem’s adumbration of tragic, comic, and satiric registers.Footnote ⁴⁸ Gianfranco Contini’s account of the Commedia’s subgenre as plurilingual “encylopedic poem” remains valuable, as do generic terms suggested by Montemaggi (“narrative poetry”) and Hawkins (“pilgrimage text”).Footnote ⁴⁹ In this book, however, I propose the notion of “pilgrimage poem” as a way to explore the particular genre of the Commedia as shaped by the poet’s understanding of himself as sinful, and of the poem as his own crucial practice of penitence and self-examination. While the cantos dedicated to the terrace of pride (Purg. 10–12) present a particularly focused reflection on the poet’s pride, and his seriousness about practicing humility, the poem continually indicates the poet’s understanding of himself as sinful, and of both poet and poem as pilgrims in via. Reading the poem as a “pilgrimage poem,” in this sense, is a way of continually directing theological attention to that authorial self-understanding, and to the poem’s compositional practices of self-examination. The readings offered in this book are thus attentive to moments of failure and self-deception within the text, in which the poet appears initially to misunderstand things that can only be understood later on, in the process of making this pilgrimage into the mind of God. Elena Lombardi has suggested that the semiotics of the Commedia are Augustinian: For Dante as for Augustine, language is necessarily obscure, wandering in exile, until its return to Christ, the redeemer of signs and the perfecter of language.Footnote ⁵⁰ Where language meets charity, wandering ceases, and meaning becomes stable. In a similar way, my reading methods in this book are attentive to the pilgrim nature of the language of the poem. I pay particular attention to the semantic itinerary of superbia and umiltà, terms at the heart of the spiritual and linguistic conversion that the poem performs, and terms related to them by etymology or meaning, as discussed below. In this process, I draw attention to the ways in which the poem is on pilgrimage toward the true meanings of language. At the same time, the method of commentary, of continual return to the language of the poem, endeavors to keep at bay any tendency isogetically to read an overarching doctrinal perspective into the poem, and instead continually to explore what the poem is doing precisely in the way that it works. For Dante’s theological method, in the end, remains the method of poetry. The Commedia is endlessly miscellaneous and syncretic in its theological construction, and what the poem represents, I argue, is not a totalizing doctrinal perspective but rather an imaginative theological vision.

Humility and Christian Thought

I referred earlier to a moment in my personal history that illuminates a modern confusion around the idea of humility, so often associated with coercion or passivity. The classic understanding of humility that emerges in Scripture, as well as in late antique and medieval Christian sources, and that appears powerfully to shape Dante’s vision of humility within the Commedia, presents an important counterpoint to these associations; so let me begin there.

From its earliest appearances in biblical literature and in antique and medieval Christian sources, humility has been understood as a realistic disposition in relation to God, a disposition that orients humans toward their proper role and their worth within divine purposes: In the song of Hannah, echoed in the song of Mary known as the “Magnificat”; in the prophecies of Isaiah; in the kenosis “hymn” of Philippians 2, humility is linked to dignity. To be humble is, paradoxically, to find one’s place in God’s providential plan and ultimately to be exalted with God. Augustine placed humility at the center of the Christian life, highlighting its paradigmatic importance as the action of the incarnate Christ and the basis of Christian discipleship. For Augustine, humility was most fully disclosed in the kenotic action of Christ’s incarnation and passion, but it was also a rejection of the Roman premium on superbia. Rather than requiring that humans claim their place in the social order, Augustine saw, the Christian life required that believers follow Christ’s humble example, pursuing a rightly ordered love, for God, self, and neighbor – as penitent souls in Dante’s purgatory are learning to do.Footnote ⁵¹ For desert fathers such as Cassian, humility is indexed to ascetical practices intended to support the soul’s progress in virtue and protection from viceFootnote ⁵²; while in Benedict’s rule, humility is synthetically reconceived as both eschatological – in ascending the ladder of humility, the monk approaches heaven – and as the everyday practice of self-giving love within the context of community.Footnote ⁵³ In the Moralia in Job of Gregory the Great, Christ’s humble self-emptying is united to Christian ethics, and the practice and experience of humility is interpreted as a “wound of love” through which God heals and teaches humans to love each other and to desire God.Footnote ⁵⁴

Medieval monastic sources reflect a similar emphasis on humility as orienting oneself in the divine: In the Ordo Virtutem of Hildegard von Bingen, humility is both the process and the end reward of the soul’s journey into joyful repentance; while Anselm of Canterbury and Bernard of Clairvaux revise earlier monastic “ladders” of ascent to the divine with their own stepwise programs of humility.Footnote ⁵⁵ For each of these writers, humility is celebrated as a practice of embracing divine roles and divine actions, and of enjoying the rewards of loving relation to God and to one’s neighbors in community. These explorations are, finally, integrated into Thomas’s discussion of humility and pride in the Summa, which positions humility as the foundation of the virtues, an inward disposition that grants access to the other virtues and their perfection, but eschews “outward exaltation.” Thomas’s integration of Christian sources with Aristotelian virtue might be read as anticipating contemporary concerns: Speaking of humility as a moderating virtue, for instance, implies that humility may become excessive, or manipulative.Footnote ⁵⁶ Yet the classic conception remains more or less intact: Throughout these foundational sources, humility is understood as a practice that issues in spiritual dignity. Through humility, humans arrive at the proper understanding of themselves as a part of God’s creation, as beloved of God and oriented in loving relation toward God and community.

It is this positive conception of humility, intimately linked to divine, rightly ordered love and the acceptance of oneself as engaged in divine action, that appears to be missing from contemporary characterizations of humility, resulting in the confusing association of humility with a manipulated sense of self-diminution. Certain readers of Dante bear witness to this confusion when they assume that for Dante, humility must be feigned, a strategy to establish his genius at the expense of other writers.Footnote ⁵⁷ Other critics, however, point to the importance of humility within the Commedia: The poem’s awareness of sin, its performance of penitence, and its confessed audacity have created a space for reconsidering the centrality of humility to the poem.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pride is notoriously privileged as a matter of personal interest for the poet, as he confesses in the realm of envy only after he completes his tour through the terrace of pride:

By the same token, humility receives privileged attention as the antidote to the sin that besets him. On this first terrace of purgatory, to which Dante dedicates three full canti, the prideful learn humility through painful exercises and sublime examples, and Dante receives his own schooling through a conversation with the artist Oderisi. Yet Dante’s claim to have learned the ways of humility from Oderisi has failed to convince some of the best-known contemporary readers of Dante. Teodolinda Barolini notes Dante’s persistent interest in names and in fame, and his high ambitions for his poema sacro, as evidence that Dante’s claim rings hollowFootnote ⁵⁹; and for Harold Bloom, Dante remains the example par excellence of the anxiety of influence, stealing lines from poets whom he simultaneously claims to have surpassed.Footnote ⁶⁰ Both of these scholars have tended to represent Dante as predominantly prideful and thus disingenuous in his espousal of Christian doctrines of humility. For instance, Dante’s implicit self-comparison to Giotto, whom be believed to have surpassed his forerunner Cimabue, has been understood simply as evidence of his hubris, and, by extension, of the hubris of the Commedia itself, undermining any “moral lesson” that might otherwise emerge from such passages.Footnote ⁶¹ Such readings find further evidence in Dante’s apparent sense of triumph over contemporary troubadour poets, over Virgil and Ovid; and occasionally, over – or at least on par with – the authority of scriptural writers.Footnote ⁶²

In the Commedia, humility often receives the highest commendation; Dante’s conversation with Oderisi may be linked with many other instances across the poem in which humility is represented as a preeminent Christian attitude. Toward the end of Purgatorio, for example, Dante undertakes a series of penitential actions, resembling Christian practices of baptism and confession: He washes in the river Lethe, hears Beatrice’s litany of his sins, and is physically forced to endure her gaze. These actions might be understood as a series of exercises in humility, exercises that penetrate far more deeply than the moral axiom in Oderisi’s speech. Furthermore, these exercises suggest that humility is far more than the negation of pride: In the Commedia, humility has an active, spiritual force that drives Dante’s progress into paradise. In a similar way, Dante’s poetry may actually be fueled by humility, more than by pride; for humility, I argue, is required by the process of self-examination out of which the poem is constructed.

Auerbach and Humilitas-Sublimitas

In addition to matters of poetic rivalry and reputation, Dante’s alleged hubris has often been understood as manifest in his literary style, which adumbrates multiple literary genres and aspires to unite ineffable themes with a vernacular language, giving evidence to Dante’s intimate contact with vernacular literary culture and other popular cultural forms.Footnote ⁶³ Throughout his many essays touching on Dante and Christian literatures, Erich Auerbach describes Dante’s representational style as emerging from the style characteristic of Christian writers from the early decades of Christianity through the thirteenth century. The Christian mixed style that Auerbach recognizes in Scriptural writers and in many early Christian writers communicates a lofty theme in a lowly form, the mysteries of the Christian gospel in a plainspoken, accessible tongue – the sermo humilis.Footnote ⁶⁴ Auerbach’s assessment of Dante’s work is historical and philological; but though Auerbach likely did not have constructive theology in mind, his work is extremely suggestive theologically, and inspires this book’s theological explorations of humility in Dante’s poem. Auerbach regards Commedia as the zenith of the sermo humilis, but also as its inevitable breaking point. We find a dramatic statement of Dante’s disruptiveness in Mimesis, in which Auerbach interprets Dante’s realism as extending this mixed style to heights of human sophistication that were previously “unthinkable.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Humilitas thus dignified cannot, for Auerbach, remain humilitas in the same sense. It is this trajectory in his thought to which I respond: for while Auerbach’s exploration of the mixing of styles implies that humility must be elevated, and even elevating, his arguments are primarily concerned with literary history and with the place of Dante’s representational art within it. Recognizing the lofty themes of Christian thought entering into “lowly form,” the sublime made humble in the humilitas-sublimitas, along with the elevation of lowly forms to the sublime dignity of their high theme, the humble made sublime, Auerbach’s assessment rests finally on the question of Dante’s soft-causal effects on literary genealogy. Thus his work often places Dante’s superb realism at the center of analysis; and that realism is encountered primarily as dignifying the human form as though in “eclipse” of the divine.Footnote ⁶⁶ Yet Auerbach is simultaneously richly aware of the “vertical,” divine significance of Dante’s characters and events, grounded in what he calls Dante’s “figural realism.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The central role of humility in the Commedia’s vision of human transformation, a vision that has implications both for Dante’s literary style and for his engagement with Christian thought, is implicit in Auerbach’s thought. Nor should we be surprised to identify theological veins within his work, for Auerbach described his work on one occasion as “engaged for many years with Christian theology,” citing Etienne Gilson as well as the German Catholic theologian Romano Guardini – another prolific, though currently understudied, scholar of Dante and his Commedia.Footnote ⁶⁸

This book thus pursues the theological implications of what Auerbach undertook as a literary and historical question of the effects of Dante’s style: if the Commedia is the ultimate realization of the humilitas-sublimitas, if the poem’s style – vernacular, eclectic, syncretic, and fully Dante’s ownFootnote ⁶⁹ – reflects in its highest form the merging of sublimitas and humilitas that we find in the doctrines of Incarnation and Passion “in overwhelming measure” – what might this illuminate about the transformation of the pilgrim soul that must learn to embrace humility before approaching paradise?Footnote ⁷⁰ As scholars have come to recognize a form of vernacular theology in Dante’s poem, and as this book proceeds to interpret the Commedia as what I have called a “pilgrimage poem,” we may discover within its lines an active, transforming humilitas-sublimitas that extends Auerbach’s perceptions and yields a fully theological vision of humility. At the same time, the Commedia may offer its readers an understanding of humility that is as different from our contemporary conceptions as the Christian understanding of humilis was from its Roman antecedents.

Humility and Feminist Theology

Let me now turn to say more about some of these contemporary conceptions of humility; for critical invocations of humility are by no means limited to studies of Dante. For critics such as Bloom and Barolini, humility is treated primarily as a feigned attitude that one adopts to mask ambitious pursuits. Such negative assessments are hardly new: In the sixteenth century, Machiavelli characterized Christian humility as a privileged form of quietistic abnegation, in sharp contrast to the emphasis of the Roman world on glory attained through action.Footnote ⁷¹ Contemporary feminist theological critics of humility have often implicitly affirmed the Machiavellian dichotomy by assessing humility primarily as the absence of pride, a purely interior condition achieved when one’s pride has been effaced by repeated degradation and inaction. Deployed to these ends, humility can only be recognized as either elective passivity, for strategic or self-destructive ends; or as a coercive tactic, used to keep those who are vulnerable in positions of weakness, or to prevent certain people from attaining positions of authority. By such a definition, humility deserves the rigorous criticism it has encountered, for the idea of effacing one’s pride comes uncomfortably close to the idea of effacing oneself. And while, on the one hand, artistry is often assumed to require a kind of hubristic self-promotion, Christian faith and practice, on the other, is often assumed to require, in an uncomplicated way, the wholescale erosion of one’s identity.Footnote ⁷² This assumption would pit Christianity itself against the development and the very labor involved in artistic virtuosity: Hence, we find in the work of Harold Bloom an entire corpus animated by the premise that the idea of a great Christian poet is absurd.Footnote ⁷³ Meanwhile, the ideal of embodied self-actualization, against the cultural, religious, and social forces of self-effacement and marginalization, remains a central concern for feminist thinkers, no less so for feminist theologians.

It may seem antagonistic, if not anachronistic, to place Dante’s poem in dialogue with relatively recent feminist-theological voices. Indeed, since some of the earliest explorations of self-consciously feminist theology, humility has been regarded as a vestige of the patriarchal thought widely associated with Dante’s historical Christianity. In Valerie Saiving’s seminal argument – synchronous with the emergence of what is sometimes called “second-wave feminism” – the Christian summons to humility is taken to be coherent only within a Neibuhrian, male-centered understanding of sin, in which the archetypal male sin of crooked self-aggrandizement is remediated by its opposite, the straight path of humility. Excluded from this perspective, Saiving argues, are experiences of both redemptive self-realization and sinful self-degradation: While it might be the case that egocentric self-promotion was the cardinal sin for men, for women quite often the opposite was true. Thus the conditions and circumstances of women, according to Saiving, drive them to commit sins of self-destruction far more often than the sins of pride and self-promotion that Neibuhr privileged.Footnote ⁷⁴ In Saiving’s classically essentialist critique, men are identified with certain virtues and anti-virtues, while women are identified with others, including the anti-virtue of humility; though in disassociating humility from self-realization, Saiving has already departed from the classic theological understanding, given in Scripture and early Christian thought, of humility as self-worth in divine relation. A next generation of feminist theologians, such as Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, endeavored to move beyond an essentialist paradigm of Christian virtue, thus attempting to integrate traditionally “gendered” virtues and narratives into a single “androgynous” vision: Ruether speaks in her early work, for instance, of Christ’s self-humbling as “the kenosis of patriarchy.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In this same generation of feminist critique, Joan Ferrante began calling attention to the unusual power and authority assigned to female figures within the Commedia, memorably characterizing Beatrice in particular as androgynously fulfilling a priestly role and pointing to the poem’s consisting “transgendering” of divinity.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Dante studies, Ferrante’s work inaugurated a turn toward critical assessments of the poem’s treatment of sexuality, alongside related sites of inquiry such as embodiment, affectivity, and relation across class and gender.Footnote ⁷⁷

Within feminist theology, however, the endeavor to integrate “essentialisms” in one generation provoked a more dramatic dismissal of essentialist virtues altogether in another, subjecting to critique both the association of femininity with virtues such as humility, vulnerability, and kenotic self-emptying, and the heavy Christian traditions of patriarchal thought and symbolism in which these essentialisms were taken to be incurably inscribed. Daphne Hampson, in this generation, proposes the rejection of Christianity’s inescapable patriarchy and the adoption of new metaphors for the experience of God, grounded in contemporary language and self-understanding.Footnote ⁷⁸ Meanwhile, intersectional considerations of race and ethnicity in this generation give rise to further feminist and womanist critiques of traditional Christian emphases on sacrifice and suffering as reinforcing systems and patterns of continual oppression.Footnote ⁷⁹

Oppression, however, is not the only theme of the stories driving feminist criticism; and feminist theory from its beginnings has endeavored to identify not only harm, but possibility; not only oppression, but flourishing.Footnote ⁸⁰ In tandem with schools of “third-wave” feminist thought, another wave of feminist theology has endeavored to move beyond some of the classic dichotomies of earlier feminist thought, e.g., between humility and empowerment, and between self-sacrifice and liberation, in order to reconceive contested “virtues” – vulnerability, affectivity – as resources for flourishing within a feminist-theological mode. Within the Christian theological landscape, feminist thinkers such as Janet Soskice and Elizabeth Johnson have endeavored to retrieve and reimagine central Christian doctrines by appealing both to Scriptural and theological resources and to bodily and relational metaphors, in order to forge new feminist-theological visions of mutual relation, just community, and embodied practices.Footnote ⁸¹ Kathryn Tanner has emphasized the openness to critique of traditional Christian doctrines, and their possible reconstitutions as resources for social transformation.Footnote ⁸² Such authors have tended not to address humility itself, focusing on related sites (e.g., love and mutuality); their works suggest a congenial context for reconsidering humility directly, in light of both its classic theological definition and its challenges for feminist retrieval.

Most significant to a feminist-theological retrieval of humility are works by feminist theologians such as Sarah Coakley, who has continually been engaged in the feminist recovery of virtues conventionally classed as “feminine” in order to demonstrate their importance on ethical, Christian, and feminist grounds. Within this recovery, humility and such cognate virtues as vulnerability and affectivity are reimagined as feminist sites rich in agency, embedded in bodily practices, and constitutive of a new vision of the Christic “self” that transcends gender stereotypes and erodes abusive forms of power.Footnote ⁸³ Coakley’s work has provoked critique, both from feminist theologians sharing Coakley’s interest in recovering a theology of “kenosis,” and from queer and feminist theologians critical of the heterosexism encoded within such traditional theological and feminist “goals” as vulnerability, dependence, desire, and even liberation.Footnote ⁸⁴ Nevertheless, Coakley’s work is representative of a powerful rapprochement between feminism and theology with a wide reception in Christian thought. Coakley’s work, along with that of others in this “wave” of feminist theology, suggests a congenial context for reconsidering humility in light of both its classic theological definition and its challenges for feminist retrieval.

Within the spirit of this feminist-theological rapprochement, this book endeavors to find within the Commedia a constructive vision of humility, and of divine power as something utterly distinct from human power. To be in any way satisfactory to the feminist concerns briefly sketched here – indeed, to be recognized as good news at all – divine power must be understood as something utterly different from what is exerted in oppressive regimes or conditions of social subjugation. Humility likewise must be understood, contra Machiavelli, as the foundation of a radically active, up-ending ethic of love. Recent studies have endeavored to refresh our understanding of humility, in light of the classic Christian conception, as a profoundly communal Christological ethos developed in biblical literature and in monastic traditions, rejecting the Greco-Roman, honor-based, hierarchical model of humility that preceded it.Footnote ⁸⁵ The humility discernible in Dante’s Commedia is likewise a practice of letting go of one’s self-delusions of separateness, and of recognizing oneself as part of a community, as made in the image of God and invited into the action of divine creativity. Self-emptying, in this light, must involve the emptying-out of human delusions of separateness: both the delusions of egocentric pride that Neibuhr highlights, and the delusions of unworthiness motivating the acts of self-destruction described in Saiving’s feminist response. But in attempting to understand Christ’s action of radical humility, we are venturing into understanding paradox: We are, in short, trying to understand the power of powerlessness. The Commedia, however, with its attention to the language and the dramatic action of humility, offers us a particularly illuminating way of understanding the paradoxes of humility, and of a divine power that makes itself vulnerable, not through passivity but rather through action. Reading the Commedia as a “pilgrimage poem,” as I have suggested we might do, helps us to see how the poem practices humility as it makes its journey to God, and how humility is ultimately a creative capacity, allowing the poem to become divine by participating in and submitting to God’s higher art. The way of humility on which this pilgrimage poem guides us is an imitation of Christ’s humble action, no self-erasure but rather an action that empties out the old power and receives the new, a power both creative and transforming.

Thus while feminist thought is a quiet current in this book, it animates the attention I give to the active, agency-giving model of humility that, as I argue, we can discover in this poem. Feminist readings of Dante represent a growing strand of inquiry within Dante studies, as noted above.Footnote ⁸⁶ Certain theological readers, too, have recognized concerns within the Commedia congenial to feminist-theological concerns. We find significant theological kinship with Dante’s poem in the work of Janet Soskice, herself no stranger to the Commedia; her feminist-theological vision of mutual relation, just community, and embodied practices shares much common ground with a number of theological and ethical issues foregrounded by Webb and Montemaggi.Footnote ⁸⁷ And in combination with the ever-widening bibliography on Dante’s theology, diversifying perspectives on women and gender in the Commedia suggest that Dante’s poem may be overdue for a feminist-theological assessment.Footnote ⁸⁸ That assessment is beyond the scope of this book, but remains nevertheless one of the abiding interests of the readings offered here. For reasons of supply, the reader will find that the feminist-theological comments cited within the chapters of this book are few. Instead, these readings pay special attention to the Commedia’s representations of women in light of what Barolini has called “Dante’s non-stereotyping imagination,” noting the lively complexity with which female characters are often represented, against assumptions of totalizing misogyny.Footnote ⁸⁹ And while women across the poem might be read as anticipations of Beatrice, I endeavor to show how the poem resists allegorical and typological readings of women by manifesting these figures’ earthly realities and attending to their often attenuated biographies. When the poem finally confronts the reality of Beatrice herself – Barolini’s “Beatrice loquax” – her explosive, learned, garrulous self-presentation overwhelms Dante, reframing the terms of a relationship that might have been assumed to be archetypically “courtly,” and instructing Dante in his continuing itinerary of humble self-knowledge before God.

In Dante’s sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,” a beloved lady is said to manifest a humility that is dynamic and transformative, effecting change in the hearts of those who see her.Footnote ⁹⁰ Similarly, women figures in the Commedia can be read according to the divergent realities that they manifest in their lives and bodies, and in the ways that they are awarded agency in the poem’s imagination of their realities and effects on others. Throughout these chapters, I aim to show that the poem’s itinerary is animated by the pursuit of a kind of humility richly pertinent to feminist-theological concerns: humility that is vigorously active, relationally and communally embedded, and that dynamically and creatively responds to the life and action of Christ.

Superbia

Superbia is the poem’s most common word for the sin of pride. While we find other terms for pride within the poem, and especially within Inferno, superbia is privileged in this analysis both because of its pervasive use, and because of the distinctive progression of its meanings over the course of the poem. The frequent recurrence of superbia in Inferno, in particular, offers ample opportunity to notice the preponderance and diversity of its meanings, as well as to throw into relief the relatively stable use of synonymous terms such as orgoglio (superiority or contempt).Footnote ⁹² Superbia and its variants (superbo, superbir) appear twenty-five times in the poem, with a range of meanings: belief in or feverish desire for political or familial eminenceFootnote ⁹³; the pursuit of artistic superiorityFootnote ⁹⁴; rebellion against GodFootnote ⁹⁵; the perceived advantage of a powerful presenceFootnote ⁹⁶; a steep or cruel angle, geographic or bodilyFootnote ⁹⁷; intellectual hubrisFootnote ⁹⁸; and visionary strength or capacity.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the Commedia, the terms superbia, superbo, and superbire are in the main used to describe the state or character of sinful pride toward God or other humans, or the action of elevating oneself according to that state; similarly, where it appears within the poems and commentary of the Vita Nuova, superbia is positioned as a profoundly sinful state of the heart,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ as it sometimes is in Dante’s prose works.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the De vulgari eloquentia, a work concerned with classical rhetoric, we primarily find instances of superbia reflecting a classical perspective, as when superbia denotes a lofty or magnificent literary style.Footnote ¹⁰² Strikingly, in the Commedia superbia is not everywhere used disapprovingly: we find notable exceptions in the beginning of the poem, as well as at the end. As a provisional definition for this term, according to this range of uses in the Commedia, I propose that superbia in the Commedia is the sinful condition in which humans delude themselves into a supposedly solitary pursuit of greatness, apart from and against God and other humans. Yet even this definition passes away in the light of the poem’s final use of the term, no longer pointing toward human sin but rather toward the divine perfection that humanity, and all human work, is finally invited to approach by means of the divine community. The delusions of superbia, I argue, lead humans to believe that they are fundamentally separate; and only through emptying oneself of these delusions, through the action of humility, can the souls in Dante’s world pass through the transformations that the journey offers. Thus the poem initially invokes superbia to expose delusions of worldly power; later, to indicate what at first glance appears as the exercise or trappings of conventional authority; and, ultimately, to point toward the original source of power within the divine Creator, and the futility of pursing greatness apart from that Creator and apart from other creatures.

Virgil is the first to use a variant of the word, as part of the brief biography he presents by way of introduction: “I sang of that just son of Anchises that came from Troy when proud Ilion was burned” (“cantai di quel giusto/figliuol d’Anchise che venne di Troia/poi che ‘l superbo Ilïón fu combusto”).Footnote ¹⁰³ At this point, there is no clear moral tale to tell of the fall of Troy and the burning of “proud Ilion,” its citadel; superbia is presented without commentary or explicit judgment. And it should not surprise us that Virgil might allude to superbia without opprobrium, for, broadly speaking, in the Roman empire superbia was not considered a vice so much as a prerogative. Dante, too, in the political treatise Monarchia, closely follows Virgil’s sense of superbia: for in the Aeneid, which the Monarchia quotes, the Romans are said to be ordained to “rule over nations” and to “subdue the proud” (“debellare superbos”).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Thus, following Aristotle’s civic ethics of moderation rather than Thomas’s Christian ethics, or Christian writers such as Augustine who explicitly rejected superbia in favor of the unique virtue of humility, superbia is condemned only insofar as it is exercised immoderately, or by the wrong people.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Throughout the poem, we notice Dante’s use of superbia to describe what the pilgrim perceives, rightly or otherwise, as powerful authority: a messenger from heaven, an athletic demon, Beatrice at the apex of her stern rebuke, and Francis’s sultan in court, immediately before his conversion, are all named as giving at least the passing appearance of superbia.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The poem’s final use of the term, however, has none of the connotations of pride or conventional authority: in a striking departure, Dante’s failing vision in the Empyrean is described as “not yet sublime” (“che non hai viste ancor tanto superbe”), but implicitly on its way to sublime capacity.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The word superbia itself, we find, undergoes a semantic journey, from referring primarily to the mad pursuit of superiority, to serving as the pilgrim’s halting description of perceived power, to, finally, being emptied out of its delusions of isolation and its associations with conventional power: for in paradise, there can be no capacity apart from the superb, sublime divine capacity that is granted to Dante, if only fleetingly, for the final vision of God.

Altero/altezza/alto

With the word altero (haughty), a word used only twice in the Commedia, we transition into new semantic territory. Altero describes the self-ascribed loftiness of pride,Footnote ¹⁰⁸ but is closely linked in its plain meaning (referring to height) to alto (high) and altezza (height). Alto and altezza, however, are used widely to denote the heights of excellence and the all-surpassing elevation of divinity, and alto, toward the end of the poem, is paired with umile as an appositive description of Mary (“umile e alta”).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Altezza, appearing eight times in the poem, is relatively stable in use: it identifies extreme height, and extreme dimensions, at various point on Dante’s journey,Footnote ¹¹⁰ and in only one instance, in Inferno, implies pride.Footnote ¹¹¹ The uses of alto are vast (140), and more diverse in meaning than are the uses of altezza; in a majority of cases (forty-eight) in the Commedia its meaning is literal, most often describing a geographic or cosmic height or depth.Footnote ¹¹² Occasionally (nine times) it describes a loud voice or piercing sound.Footnote ¹¹³ In two cases, it describes the deep sighs of penitent soulsFootnote ¹¹⁴; in five cases, all in Inferno, it refers to a dangerous and therefore noble endeavor.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Other figurative meanings proliferate especially in Purgatorio and Paradiso, particularly describing excellent or divine capacities, faculties or stations (thirty-four cases)Footnote ¹¹⁶; this is the meaning we find most often, though not exclusively, in Dante’s other works.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the Commedia, however, we can trace a development in the meaning of the term: As the poem progresses, alto loses any trace of connection with altero and superbia, or with strictly human qualities, and manifests a new meaning of divine elevation, reaching celestial heights and surpassing human limits and earthly possibilities (thirty-eight).Footnote ¹¹⁸ Like altezza, alto is used twice in Inferno with the possible implication of prideful self-delusion.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But as the poem goes on with its transformations – as Dante is changed on pilgrimage, and as the poem itself is changed on pilgrimage – any delusional pretensions to loftiness fall away, and alto, like superbia, is used only in the representation of divine glory.

Umiltà

The various shifts in the meaning of superbia, alto, and altezza are reflections of the way in which the poem itself is on pilgrimage with its author; these developments in meaning are markers of a compositional practice of humility, in which prideful meanings are gradually evacuated and become receptive to new and profoundly Christian meanings. In parallel with these terms, we find that the language of humility in the Commedia becomes gradually more pervasive, rich and paradoxical as it approaches its “true” meaning.

The poem’s term for humility is umiltà, along with its variants umiltate (humility), umile (humble), umilmente/umilemente (humbly), umiliare (to humble), and umilitadi (humilities). Occurring just seventeen times in the poem, these words nonetheless can be read as charting their own course in theological meaning, from lowliness to divine heights. We find one instance in Inferno, in the dark wood where Dante’s journey begins, describing the fate of umile Italia, badly in need of the restoration of imperial rule that Virgil prophesies.Footnote ¹²⁰ Here humility seems a problem to be fixed; and following this usage, umiltà is nowhere present in Inferno. In the upper realms, however, humility begins to appear widely. In Purgatorio it is first associated with plants and with generativity; and in Ante-Purgatory it frequently describes the demeanor or affect adopted when speaking to a notable person.Footnote ¹²¹ On the terrace of pride, however, umiltà is increasingly spoken of as dynamic, captured live in the miraculous visibile parlare,Footnote ¹²² appearing on the terrace’s marble banks, and as a desired, if elusive, condition of one’s inner being.Footnote ¹²³ In Paradiso, humility finds a distinctly theological meaning ascribed not only to those saints seated within the celestial rose but also to the incarnate Christ.Footnote ¹²⁴ In the course of this journey, then, these words for humility undergo their own journey, accumulating deeper and richer meanings as the poem progresses.

The changing semantics of umiltà can be ascertained in Dante’s other works, particularly in the Vita Nuova and in Dante’s other lyrics, known as Rime. Humility is often a feature of the beloved lady’s appearance, of an angel who accompanies her,Footnote ¹²⁵ or of other courtly ladiesFootnote ¹²⁶; but in the Vita Nuova in particular, umiltà, umile, and umiltate acquire a more spiritual meaning, often referring to the capacity of the beloved to receive love; the nature of her action or speechFootnote ¹²⁷; the manner of approaching the belovedFootnote ¹²⁸; or the goodness instilled in the soul of the one who loves, or even merely sees, someone whose humility is apparent.Footnote ¹²⁹ This final meaning, explored in the celebrated sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,” is also present in two of the canzoni featured in the Convivio,Footnote ¹³⁰ along with an occasional allegorical sense, referring to the humility required when submitting to wisdom.Footnote ¹³¹ In De vulgari eloquentia, we find the Latin humile used to describe the lowly literary styles appropriate to comedy and elegy, complementing the stylistic meanings of superbia cited above.Footnote ¹³²

We can observe something like an embryonic development of this notion in looking at a few moments in Dante’s other works, much of it associated with his early career. In Dante’s Rime, the word umile is often used to describe the demure attitude of the poet-lover, in contrast to the disdainful (“disdegnosa”) hauteur (“altera”) of the proud beloved lady. The development of the humility concept can also be traced by looking at its appearance in hendiadys, where particular meanings of the term are intensified: in the canzone “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,” where the lady appears not disdainful but “queta e umile” (quiet and humble); in “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete,” where she now appears “pietosa e umile” (compassionate and humble); in Purgatorio 8.24, where souls “palido e umile” (pale and humble) gaze up in expectation of what the descending angels may bring. In “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete,” glossed at length in Convivio II, the soul appears humble in receiving love, affirming the coincidence between the attitude of humility and the condition of love.

In these instances, we can trace the shifting emphasis of Dante’s concept of humility, from an appealing courtly temperament in “Amor che nella mente mi ragiona,” to the demeanor of the compassionate lady ready to offer her affections in “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete,” to the vulnerability of the pale souls in Purg. 8, who have just experienced a renewed devotion to God and an awareness of their dependence on heavenly assistance. In the Commedia’s conception of humility, we find a significant remnant of the Convivio’s understanding of humility as preparation to give and receive love. This wide range of meanings is adumbrated within the Commedia by the way in which humility comes to be understood as transformative action, undertaken as integral both to the process of conversion, within the necessary context of divine and human relationships; and to the compositional practice of writing down the poem that dramatically narrates and performs that conversion.Footnote ¹³³

The itinerary of this book is defined by the structure of the Commedia, which I analyze over the course of five chapters: one on Inferno, three on Purgatorio, and one on Paradiso. Chapter 1, “Superbia as sin in Inferno,” traces the first canticle’s account of the paradoxes of superbia, a vice that creates lexical, structural, and thematic links among major figures of the Inferno (e.g., Filippo Argenti, Farinata, Capaneus, Vanni Fucci, the giants, and Lucifer). Here I argue that as Dante descends through hell’s circles, he is exposed to the delusions of superbia, and that the lexicon and narration of this infernal descent both chart and substantiate the moral development of the poet-protagonist. The semantic development of the term superbia begins with Virgil’s Roman understanding of superbia as prerogative. By the end of Inferno, however, the pilgrim and his poem have begun to recognize superbia, not as a form of elevation, but rather as the way of degradation and ultimately of subjection. The explorations of superbia and its delusions in Inferno thus prepare Dante and his reader for the paradoxes of humility with which Purgatorio and Paradiso are engaged. Chapter 2, “Humility as Difficult Devotion (Purg. 1–9),” charts Dante’s progress through Ante-purgatory, where he begins to learn and write the new poetry of this middle realm. Dante’s language in these early cantos of the Purgatorio draws upon the registers of biblical and classical literature as well as of Christian liturgy; and the souls’ languid progress through these outer banks of purgatory is punctuated by psalms and hymns of the Christian offices. Thus, the language of the middle realm remains, as in hell, both the marker and the substance of Dante’s continuing transformation: language involves the pilgrim in the penitential practices of purgatory, and particularly in the program of humility of which, he confesses, he is particularly in need. Dante’s journey through Ante-purgatory, I argue, stages the difficulties of taking up practices of humility and of leaving behind the prideful independence and preoccupations of earthly existence. Through embracing the practices offered by Christian Scripture and liturgy, souls may overcome these distractions; through receiving the help offered by liturgical, biblical, and literary sources, as well as by the guides, messengers, and souls he encounters along the way, Dante also takes up humble practices that continually reengage him in Christian devotion, in moral action, and in the composition of the poem.

Chapter 3, “Art as humble practice (Purg. 10–12),” engages Dante’s most sustained treatment of pride and humility. Here we begin to see that the Commedia’s understanding of umiltà is explicitly linked to its anthropology, founded both on the Genesis story of human creation from the earth and on the kenosis “hymn” found in Philippians 2. In my reading of Dante’s elaborate acrostic on the word VOM (“human”) in Purg. 12, the terrace’s carved images of prideful, sinful humanity are powerfully linked to its carved images of divine, Christological humility, such that Dante’s anthropology emerges as a vision of the imago dei: Humans are disposed to pride, the root of all sin, and yet summoned divinely to imitate Christ’s foundational act of humility. The sustained attention to art and artistry over the course of this three-canto sequence further manifests the poem’s explicit linking of art with the practices and dispositions of humility. Thus, as Dante begins his ascent up the mountain, we see him simultaneously engaged in the penitential practices of humility and in the reception of Christian identity and poetic vocation. Over the course of the Purgatorio, humility is gradually revealed as both an undoing of superbia and a profound affirmation both of Dante’s humanity and of his literary calling. In Chapter 4, “Humility as love’s condition (Purg. 13–33),” I analyze the poem’s maturing reflections on love and the responsibilities of poetry as the servant of love, whether holy or profane. Following his many meetings with poets on the terraces of purgatory, themselves persevering in the perfection of their desires, Dante encounters Beatrice at its summit and, through her stern attentions, is compelled to account for his own past. This encounter, which takes the surprisingly personal turn of reducing the poet to tears of shame, dramatizes the central importance of humility to Dante’s preparation for the third realm: only in this state of humble self-awareness can he, as a poet and as a pilgrim, enter into the exaltations of paradise.

Chapter 5, “Humility as capacity in Paradiso,” traces the exaltation of the poet, specifically through the medium of his own poetry. We are warned at the outset of the third canticle that, in representing paradise, the poem will struggle; only by appealing to the paradoxical, Christological power of yielding power, can the poem achieve what it sets out to do. The final chapter thus explores the poem’s full vision of humility as the capacity by which the human artist begins to participate in the glory of God’s divine handiwork, through imitation of Christ’s humility and through “stooping” to serve that greater art. This canticle’s poetic strategies, such as the ascending structure of the gradatio device, the triple-rhymes on the name Cristo, and the suggestive subtext of the kenosis “hymn,” illustrate its developing capacity to imitate Christ’s humility and, at the same time, to serve the celestial vision of paradise. The humble recognition of Beatrice, and thus of oneself, as part of God’s art is both an artistic and an anthropological revelation of the poem, given its fullest expression in the poem’s final vision of the Trinity as “painted in our effigy” (“pinta de la nostra effige,” Par. 33.131). To know and see God, the poem reveals, is to know and see ourselves and to enter into the living paradox of Christological humility: to become like Christ both humble and exalted, and to acknowledge that we are made in the very image of God. The conclusion, “Humility in motion,” reprises the constructive proposals of the poem with respect to humility, reaffirming its importance as a form of action and as a creative capacity. Here I also return to two provocations for the book: Harold Bloom’s Freudian approach, and Erich Auerbach’s exploration of figural realism and humility. En passant, I suggest, Dante’s poem is a creative achievement that, in the end, may be seen actually to be fueled by the enormous plurality of Christian traditions. His church is no monolith to be toppled by Freudian anxiety, but a richly miscellaneous body of stories and personalities, raging conflicts, historical and legendary encounters. What Dante makes of this vast pastiche can be read to be both highly original and abundantly Christian.

Dante and the Practice of Humility endeavors to offer a new account of humility in the Commedia, one that takes into account the rigors of the spiritual transformation at work in the poem, the literary and theological “community” that populate its realms, and the productive relationship between poetics and Christian thought that marks Dante’s literary style. The exploration of humility that I have placed at the center of my readings offers an interpretive key both to Dante’s poetry and theology; and so I offer these readings as a companion that endeavors to plunge readers – particularly those interested in theology, the Bible, the dynamic roles of women, and the life of the church – directly into the poem. My hope is that, as in Dante’s image of the Annunciation on the terrace of pride, seeing humility in this poem may open the door of its enigmas and allow readers of this book to taste and see them.