Dante’s Divine Comedy observed from different view

Looking for answers beyond The Church

Naturally enough, the vast majority of texts and ideas that will be considered in this volume come from the period when people started looking beyond the Church for answers to their questions, after approximately 1700. To find a way into a more nuanced definition, however, one may reconsider Dante’s Divine Comedy at this point, making a distinction between medieval and modern theologies that is informative. The traditional way to understand Dante’s poem is to view it as a reflection upon the tension between philosophy and theology, personified in the figures of Virgil and Dante respectively. On this reading philosophy leads the pilgrim – Dante – into a sequence of reflections and encounters, principally with the consequences of moral failings. This process is characterized by a high degree of openness, so that for Virgil reason is given free rein to address the questions humanity faces in understanding itself morally.

This process, however, is very limited: it can lead Dante through Hell and into Purgatory,
for example, but it cannot cross the boundary of Purgatory, into Heaven itself.

Why? Because Heaven is the realm of God and the Church, and only faith – and faiththinking, or theology – can find its way in that world. Heaven is closed; and it “opens” only to the eyes of faith, not to those of reason. Virgil, therefore, is literally incapable of guiding Dante into Heaven, because he cannot “see” Heaven, a reality that afflicts him and which characterizes his state in Limbo, as Dante describes in the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy:

I am Virgil; and for no other crime
Than not having faith, I lost heaven . . .
(Purgatorio vii. 7–8)1




On this reading, Dante’s Divine Comedy is a work of medieval theology because
medieval theology is characterized by an emphasis upon a closed universe, ordered by
God and intelligible solely to God. Philosophy, it is true, pushes toward openness, so
that one might argue that certain forms of scholastic theology in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries find their center in the debate over the proper limits of reason.

The extent to which they can play any role in theological reflection.

That tension between closure and openness, faith and reason – is central to Dante, as I have argued;
but it is also central to the greater world of medieval and scholastic theologies.
And, for Dante at least, it is a tension that can only be resolved in favor of closure, because God’s
world is the locus of God’s being, and God’s being is not open to human thought.

Other ways to read Dante

There is at least one other way to read Dante, however, and it is what I have characterized
as the modern reading of the Divine Comedy. On this reading the tension between philosophy and theology is not antagonistic, and cannot be characterized in terms of a juxtaposition of openness and closure. Rather, the subject matter of both philosophy and theology is the same, namely, human being. The sole difference, admittedly a significant one, is that philosophy and theology approach this subject matter from different perspectives, and with different presuppositions; or, stated more clearly,
they give different answers to the same questions. One of the clearest examples of this process at work in twentieth-century thought was in the relationship between the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the theologian Rudolf Bultmann.

Analysis

For both Heidegger and Bultmann the proper subject matter of reflection was human being, something which both men thought was best intelligible in terms of existentialist analysis.
As Bultmann readily acknowledged, Heidegger’s historical phenomenological analysis of the conditions of possibility of authentic existence is as useful for theology as it is for philosophy. Why? Because human being is evidently human existence, and as such requires understanding prior to asking more fundamental – transcendental – questions of it. As Bultmann wrote in his 1925 essay “What does it mean to speak about God?”: “Before one can speak of God, one must first be able to speak of man.”