Saint of the Week: Dante Alighieri, Supreme Poet of Italy

The Salutation of Beatrice by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Throughout Christian history, two ways of living, praying, meditating have co-existed, generally peacefully.  One of these ways is the Way of Negation, the way of denial, of asceticism, of apophatic theology (to describe God only by what He isn’t).  The other is the Way of Affirmation (or something — apologies if I’m wrong; correct me in the comments!), the way of joyful living, of cataphatic theology (to describe God by the attributes revealed in Scripture & reasoned from the universe).  Both are needed, I believe, and most of us fall a little bit in each.

The latter type of believer includes such luminaries as C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, the other has St. Antony and Dionysius the Areopagite.  In his masterful history of the Spirit at work in the Church, The Descent of the Dove, Charles Williams places Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321) amongst those who tread the Way of Affirmation.

Dante lived bountifully.  In La Vita Nuova we do see a little bit more swooning than would be appropriate in our culture or even in actual 13th-century Florence.  However, this swooning was because he was grasping life so fully, not denying what was there in Beatrice and thus living the earthly life given by Almighty God to its very fullest extent.

He is best known, however, not for swooning over Beatrice, but for La Divina Commedia, The Divine Comedy, a work in three volumes: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.*  The first volume is the only I have yet to read; we begin with Dante’s journeys in Hell, right to Satan’s belly, with Virgil as guide.  Thence Virgil takes him to Purgatory; my friend Andrew finds Purgatory quite amusing — it is rumoured to be the most original of the three.  And Beatrice leads him through Paradise.

I know people who are obsessed with being lame, so they say things like, “Dante’s Inferno is just a really long version of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid.“**  Yes, Dante reworks a lot of Virgil’s material.  But he does it in a thoroughly Christian, thoroughly Mediaeval way (since neither the Renaissance nor Florentine Renaissance actually happened [along with the “Dark Ages”], Dante is pure Mediaeval awesomeness).  Dante’s Hell is not simply the place where the wicked are punished in various curious ways.

It is you.

Yes, you are Dante’s Hell.  Don’t worry — you’re also Purgatory and Paradise.  A Christian story is not simply beautiful, but beauty that points to Truth.  And the Truth we see in Hell is the embodiment of all of our sins, from pettiness to treason.  The Inferno is an unveiling of the messy, unpleasant business we call “fallenness.”  Do what you will with Genesis 2-3 — there may be funnier, more “life-affirming” creation stories out there*** — but it relates a basic truth about our lives.  We are all screwed up.  We all have Hell within.

If all Dante did was moan about Hell and how to avoid it, then he would fall firmly in the category of “The Way of Negation.”  But he moves on from Hell, to Purgatory and, ultimately, Paradise.  We have these places in us as well.  Made in the Image of the Living God, there is glory and beauty in the human race.  We are not designed to wallow in the filth of our own sin.  We are designed for the glory and beauty of Paradise, accessed through the work of Purgatory.

Thus, the Divine Comedy.  If this were all Dante Alighieri had written, he would deserve an account in every Church History textbook.  However, he was also a great scholar and populariser of the vernacular, as in De Vulgari Eloquentia (in Latin here).  He also got entangled in local politics, getting himself exiled.  Finally, he was a Third Order Franciscan (and we all know my love for St. Francis) — indeed, if we count Dante among the Great Franciscans, St. Francis died in 1226, St. Bonaventure lived from 1221 to 1274, and Dante was born in 1265.  They all overlapped and all have had a powerful impact upon the thoughtlife of the Christian world.

So read a little Dante today, for there you will find a man plugged into the Fountain of Life.  There you will find a man thoroughly engrossed in the world of his day — political, intellectual, poetic — yet who did not lose sight of the one God worthy of praise.

*In Dorothy L. Sayers’ translations for Penguin, that would be Hell, Purgatory, Paradise.

**This is the lame sort of person who can see nothing but political propaganda in the Aeneid.

***The Blackfoot one related by Tomson Highway in “Why Cree is the Funniest of All Languages,” (in Me Funny ed. Drew Hayden Taylor) is certainly funnier.

Saint of the Week?

Over at Matthew’s Random Ramblings, I had a tendency to post a poem each week (they can be seen here), something I took up again yesterday.  I decided that over here at the pocket scroll, we could have a saint each week.

Part of the thrust of classic Christianity as described in the pages on the sidebar is to draw us back into the Great Tradition that has carried forth the Word of Life through the ages and to us.  I want us to draw back to those who have gone before and tap into their devotional practices, their ways of reading Scripture, their teachings, their poems, their examples of life.  Classic Christianity is more than just a bunch of books; it is men and women, flesh and blood, body and spirit.  Lives have been lived in the service of Christ, deaths have been died in the same.  By turning to this Great Cloud of Witnesses, to this Communion of Saints, we are tying ourselves into something much bigger than the concerns of today and this year.

Questions inevitably arise when a Prot does something of this sort, most notably: who counts as a saint? (Usually said meaning, “I’m a saint too, aren’t I?”)  A saint is, literally/etymologically, a “holy one.”  I take all Christians no longer with us as fair game as saints.  Since I’m Anglican, any who appear outside of the Early or Mediaeval/Byzantine Church are probably going to be from that tradition, but I’m also unafraid of post-Reformation Catholic or Orthodox saints.  I may post about St. Seraphim of Sarov and St. John of the Cross someday, their lives here on this blog alongside Richard Hooker and Thomas Cranmer.

My hope is that we will be drawn nearer to God by their examples, that we will be inspired by the works He has wrought in those who have gone before us, that our faith in His ability to pierce the veil between Earth and Heaven will be bolstered.

I hope also to herein explore ways of honouring the saints suitable to a Protestant Anglican who believes that it was with good reason the Reformers gave us this Article of Religion:

XXII. Of Purgatory.
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Relics, and also Invocation of Saints, is a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

Nonetheless, if you are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox and seek the intercession of the saints and venerate their icons and holy days, I hope that these musings here will be of some help and possibly draw us to seek out new and creative ways to engage with those who precede us.

I have written about one saint here already, St. Columba.

At Matthew’s Random Ramblings, I have already written about these saints:

The Blessed Virgin Mary

St. Clare of Assisi

St. Francis of Assisi here and here

St. Thomas Becket

St. Nicholas of Myra

St. Hilda

Ramon Llull here and here