The forgotten work of the eminent Dominican historian of Christian theology, Pierre Mandonnet, Dante le théologien, published in 1935 before the author’s death in 1939, is presented anew in English translation by Dantist Corbett and theologian Kelly. Mandonnet’s book was promptly criticized and condemned by Étienne Gilson in Dante et la philosophie (1939). Gilson’s work has been embraced and celebrated by Dante scholars ever since. However, Mandonnet’s work, as Corbett’s detailed introduction argues, aligns with the approach of the early commentators and may, in crucial ways, be the most plausible approach to reading Dante’s poem. This approach radically reverses fundamental postulates, not to say prejudices, that have reigned supreme in Dante studies over the last century.
The father figures of contemporary Dante studies sided with Gilson, and Mandonnet’s work has never again been seriously re-examined until now. Mandonnet, following his own Dominican mentor at the University of Fribourg, Joachim-Joseph Berthier, very plausibly reads the story of Dante’s journey through the other worlds of the Christian afterlife as a theological allegory, a fiction that poetically illuminates and expounds Christian doctrine. Dante’s narrative is so compelling, and seems to be so true in its deeply human and arguably divine meaning, that the analysis of its kind of truth, and of this truth’s ways and means, has proved inexhaustibly challenging for criticism to get its head around. The truth of this poem seems to exceed the limits of poetic fiction by its power to convert souls and, in any case, transform lives through its artistic puissance and virtuosity.
The authoritative critics Bruno Nardi and Charles Singleton, who have most oriented contemporary Dante studies, impressed by this overwhelming power of the poem’s claim to truth, took positions that made it literally true, either as a true account of an actual mystical vision (Nardi) or as an “allegory of the theologians,” like the Bible, whose literal-historical sense is presumed true (Singleton). These approaches subordinate or relativize the poem’s allegorical senses. By asserting the truth of its literal sense, they consign Dante’s poem to a remote and alien Middle Ages with belief in miraculous events and supernatural worlds such as, presumably, are no longer literally believable for modern readers. This reigning paradigm, even while recognizing and exalting the powerful claim to truth emanating from the poem, makes it difficult, if not impossible, for modern readers to actually experience the poem as true. Moderns like Nardi and Singleton can recognize, but not really believe, the poem’s imperious truth claims.
This interpretive mind-set is congenial to the secular spirit, but it misunderstands and distorts the way Dante’s poetry works to vehiculate theological revelation. Alternatively, the literal sense of Dante’s poem can be understood as indeed a fiction that serves to reveal symbolically and allegorically theological truths of the Catholic faith with unparalleled force and clarity.
Corbett’s argument, I think, is right on target for reversing contemporary Dante studies in a direction that makes theology again plausible as a deeper interpretation of human reality in the light of revelation rather than a myth that can no longer be seriously believed in a secular age.
There is a (nonliteral) sense in which poetry, with Dante, even as fiction, becomes true revelation of our human state in this life and in eternity. The aforementioned twentieth-century deans of Dante studies made the poem palatable to the modern, secular mind paradoxically by medievalizing it. They identified its truth with its literal sense in the terms of medieval exegesis and made it believable hypothetically for medievals, but not for moderns. However, it is possible to treat the poem’s revelation as all very contemporary as well, in the sense of poetry as fiction, as consisting in “glorious lies” (in its literal sense) that symbolize our ultimate truth in the way Mallarmé, for example, suggests for modern symbolist poetry. This is the secret source of the poem’s perennial power felt ever since its earliest commentators and down to its innumerable fervent readers today.
Corbett reconstructs a couple of classic debates that illustrate the stakes of Mandonnet’s interpretation. The role of Thomas Aquinas as Dante’s main theological authority was for a time universally accepted since the revival of Dante and Thomism by pope Leo XIII late in the nineteenth century with his encyclical Aeterni patris (1879). Nardi highlighted significant divergences from Aquinas, but he obscured Dante’s reliance on Thomistic doctrine as primary resource throughout the Commedia.
Another decisive point is the status of Beatrice as historical woman or symbol or both – the three alternatives influentially outlined by Edward Moore in 1891. Over the centuries, many interpreters, along with Mandonnet, took Beatrice to be purely a theological symbol. However, contemporary scholarship has treated some version of the realist interpretation as alone plausible. Beyond the inconclusive facts of the matter stands the issue of Dante’s purpose. Dante’s work evinces a powerful impulse to memorialize his autobiography, but also to transfigure the facts of his life by theologizing them. Poetry becomes indeed an original modality of theological revelation. This can, however, lead to perhaps exaggerated assessments of Dante’s theological originality. The poem’s purpose simply to teach Catholic doctrine is also pervasively palpable. Dante makes theology existential (as von Balthasar observed), but perhaps with principally didactic intentions.
These are the lineaments of Corbett’s argument for a reconsideration of Mandonnet’s rejected and forgotten positions. Corbett proposes them as at least as plausible as those that have come to be accepted unquestionably by several recent generations of Dante scholars. His intervention should unsettle these convictions and throw open debate on fundamentals. The hinge, as Mandonnet and Corbett present the argument, is the difference between secularized and clericalized interpretive approaches. I would say simply that it is a matter of the degree of openness to religious belief, which is for many absurd in our technoscientific age, but for others a necessary reaction to this age – a postmodern turning away from an asphyxiating modern framework, with its compulsory hermeneutics of suspicion, toward the (w)hol(l)y Other.
