Rethinking Dante:God and Mortality in the Comedy
Promoting God's Divinity, the Divine Comedy Praises Imperfection Too
Sep 23, 2008
In Dante's Comedy the pilgrim undertakes a journey which has been classically described as a process of learning and relearning; he wanders the afterlife, encountering the spectrum of God's virtues and vices, and his reactions - often very human, very real reactions - are corrected by his teachers. Through that process he learns the ways of God and God's justice system, and the imperfections in his own rationale are superseded by God's omniscience.
The Francesca Episode
That paradigm can be seen throughout the work, and the most famously cited example is that of Francesca de Rimini, whose resolvedly classical manipulation of pathos in her tale of the love that bound her to Paolo leads the pilgrim to faint from his sheer sadness.
It is hard for the reader not to feel the affect; Francesca tells the pilgrim that “there is no greater sorrow / than thinking back upon a happy time / in misery (Inferno: 5. 121-123)”, and with the moans of the accused bellowing about her, it is difficult not to concur. Yet, the traditional interpretation of the episode, as a case in point for the whole Comedy, is that pathos is utilised to develop a sense of sympathy within the pilgrim – and by association, the reader - so that it may be shattered as false.
In Praise of the Mortal Mind
But what at first reading feels like displacement is juxtaposition. Dante creates pathos, uses high tragedy, in order to keep them there in the reader's mind when they are dramatically removed the by the guidance and rebukes of the pilgrim's teachers; the godly world may condemn the imperfection of human emotion, but the reader feels it nonetheless, and it is more real than the intangible perfection of God’s ways.
This pattern is repeated throughout the Comedy; we see it with Francesca, and in the Wood of the Suicides (Inferno XIII), and in Cato’s scolding of Dante for reminiscing with Casella, singing beautiful earthly songs and lingering passionately over human memories (Purgatorio II).
At one level then, the poem enforces and codifies Christian doctrine, whilst on another it celebrates the earthly mind, the mortal reactions to the ordering of God’s sphere. For when Virgil, the pilgrim’s great teacher and close friend disappears at the close of the Purgatorio, Dante’s pilgrim rejects the divine in favour of human emotion:
And even all our an ancient mother lost
was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed
with dew, from darkening again with tears. (Purgatorio: 52-54)
Here, what is at stake in the pilgrim’s words seem the very definition of ambivalence. As they walk through the earthly paradise, as candelabras of the parade are likened to seven beautiful stars, and they sing hymns in praise of god, the pilgrim dismisses the works of the Lord. He quite explicitly states that all that heaven offers - the vast beauty of paradise before his very eyes – is not enough to curb lament for the loss of his great teacher; the loss of human brotherhood.
Bridging a Gap: Reconciling God with Humanity
It seems fair, then, to suppose that Dante’s pilgrim is championing the mortal life, accepting our falling away from God if it allows for the beauty of human relationships. It doesn’t seem that the importance of this can be undermined; his reaction is one that shows just how incomprehensible the journey has been to him. For what has the pilgrim learnt, truly, if he still doubts the works of the divine; if he can come through the fires of hell to witness God’s perfection and dismiss it as secondary to human relationships?
Indeed, what has the reader learnt? It seems we have learnt something of the nature of the broken relationship between man and God. In using the human voice to outline the mistakes in the mortal frame, he gives voice and authority to the human mind, makes it a partner in his pursuit for divine understanding. As much as Dante praises God in his Comedy, perhaps as much of his praise should be rightfully attributed to the human world.
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