This book examines Dante’s Divine Comedy as centrally concerned with humility and as a compositional exercise, training its author in the practice of humility. Canto by canto, Teubner demonstrates the many means – textual, intertextual, and ascetical – by which the poem’s theology responds to the concerns of today’s readers. Read in this way, the language and poetry of the Comedy can be approached as dramatizing the capacities of humility that is rightly understood as grounded in right relation to the divine: self-giving and yet dynamically self-possessed.

Teubner contributes to a turn in Dante studies that reads the Comedy as a practice of self-examination, informed by the scriptural, literary, and liturgical background of the poem, while offering fresh feminist perspectives on its theological challenges. Undergraduate and novice readers will benefit richly from this gracefully written companion, which also introduces theologians to a growing body of scholarship exploring Dante’s religious thought.

This chapter analyzes the poem’s maturing reflections on love and on the responsibilities of poetry as the servant of love, whether holy or profane. Encounters with poets throughout the terraces of purgatory, followed by Dante’s dramatic encounter with Beatrice at its summit, dramatize the central importance of divinely perfected love as challenging misogyny and conditioning humility, and thus preparing Dante 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.

This chapter charts Dante’s descent through hell’s circle and his exposure to the delusions of superbia, arguing that the lexicon and narration of this infernal descent dramatize and substantiate the moral development of the poet-protagonist. By the end of Inferno, however, the pilgrim and his poem have begun to recognize the ways in which superbia may be deceptive: pursued on human terms, it degrades humans and demonstrates their subjection to God.

This chapter examines Dante’s journey through Ante-purgatory as staging 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, I argue, 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.

The conclusion reviews the constructive proposals of the poem with respect to humility as an action performed, while placing them within the broader view of the poem’s plurality of Christian traditions and its openness to disagreement and revision. Returning to provocations from Harold Bloom and Erich Auerbach, I argue that Dante’s poem is a creative achievement that, in the end, may be seen actually to be fueled by the miscellany of Christian stories, conflicts, and encounters.

This chapter engages Dante’s most sustained treatment of pride and humility, i.e., his passage along the terrace of pride, as grounded in a divine anthropology, drawing both on the Genesis story of human creation from the earth and on the kenosis “hymn” found in Philippians 2. Through images carved into the terrace, and through literary devices inscribed within these cantos, 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.

This chapter traces the exaltation of the poet through the medium of the Paradiso’s poetry: here poetic devices illustrate the poem’s 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.