Mathematics, Mystery, and Memento Mori: Teaching Humanist Theology in Dante’s Commedia

Abstract

Undergraduate students in the United States of America are increasingly less religious, and this decline in religiosity is felt not only at secular colleges and universities, but also at those with a religious affiliation. This article seeks to answer the question of how one can effectively teach the Christian vision in Dante’s Commedia to undergraduates who have little or no religious formation. The methods I have used to teach freshmen in core Humanities courses have differed somewhat from the methods I have used to teach upperclassmen in Literature electives. For the freshmen, focusing on what I call “humanist theology” has been successful, allowing them to see that the Christianity found in Dante’s epic is not merely a list of rules, but a way of viewing human life that is consonant with their own experiences. Purgatorio is the most important canticle for this method, and the case of Virgil’s damnation is a vital topic. For upperclassmen, finding analogies to Christian Mystery in the fields of mathematics, the sciences, and creative writing has proven fruitful. The main conclusion of this study is that these techniques are useful in presenting Dante’s work to non-religious students without sacrificing the epic’s specifically Christian content.

1. Introduction

If high school students or undergraduates have read any portion of Dante’s Commedia, it is almost certainly his Inferno. There are good reasons for this fact. The canticle begins the epic, depicts physical struggle and moral growth, and (most importantly for younger readers) has enough gory contrapassos to qualify as horror fiction. Reading only Inferno, however, always seemed to me to be a disservice both to students and to Dante’s epic vision. This opinion has only become more solidified as I have continued to see the undergraduate classroom populated by students whose religious formation is slim to nonexistent. “Nones”—young people who do not identify with any religion—are a fast-growing demographic in America. Smith and Snell’s vital work on young adult religion and spirituality indicates that only 5% of American youth are religiously “devoted” (attending weekly services; praying often), and that only 14.3% fall into the “regular” category (regular, but not weekly, attendance of religious services; prayer less important in daily life) (Smith and Snell 2009, p. 259).1 Their research thus indicates that religious faith plays little to no role in the lives of over 80% of “emerging adults” (people in their teens and twenties). Traditional undergraduate students are exactly this demographic. Religiously-affiliated universities have student bodies that are perhaps atypical because of self-selection, but studies of faith-based higher education have concluded that this is generally not the case (Marsden 1994; Morey and Piderit 2006). As these demographic trends continue, the professor at a Catholic or Christian school cannot rely on basic religious literacy in many students.

Given these trends, I had to consider carefully what image of God and Christianity one gets from Inferno alone. The answer is likely a version of what non-Christians and inadequately catechized Christians already think: the Christian God is at best a rigid authoritarian (“follow my rules or else be tortured forever in Hell”). The Gates of Hell say that Love made them, which appears to add insult to injury.2 At worst, God becomes a sadistic bully, damning souls who simply had the misfortune to commit a single sin, single sins that do not seem wrong to most 21st-century students. Undergraduate students are more apt to look at Pietro della Vigna’s suicide (Inferno 13) and Brunetto Latini’s homosexuality (Inferno 15) with pity and understanding, further solidifying for many students the notion that Christian theology is inhuman and outdated. As someone interested in both the fullness of the Christian tradition and the richness of Dante’s theological imagination, I find that teaching Inferno alone creates more problems than it solves.

The question, then, is how to do justice to the complexity of Dante’s theological epic with students who, by and large, lack the necessary background to appreciate it. At Mount St. Mary’s University, I have taught Dante’s Commedia every Spring as part of a required Freshman Humanities survey on the Classical and Christian Imagination. I have also taught the entire work (in translation) in an English elective on the Epic. My experiences of teaching Dante to these two different populations—general population freshmen who are required to be in my course, and upperclassmen (largely English majors) who elected to take my course—have led me to think that the path to guiding non-religious students to appreciate Dante’s epic must be found in the heart of the work, Purgatorio. It is in this second canticle that the reader sees even more clearly the nature of sin and virtue, and, more importantly, how Dante begins to complicate the rules of the afterlife through the question of salvation for noble pagans, a particularly troubling case for the character of Virgil. In this essay, I will share some of the strategies I have found useful for helping general population underclassmen to see that Dante’s Christian vision is actually more nuanced than they might have thought, and more relevant to their own lives. My challenge with non-religious upperclassmen was a bit different, since the most troubling canticle for them was Paradiso. In their case, I had to justify a poem written about a non-human subject: heavenly realities that we cannot “know,” and that even Christians must admit are mysterious.3 For these upperclassmen, contemporary poems about mathematics and science proved to be apt analogies to begin, at least, to carve out a place for metaphysical poetics in their understanding of literature. In both cases, I found that a kind of “Humanist Theology”—meditating on mysteries that are evident simply to reason and lived human experience, apart from revelation—was a key concept to meet them where they were and help them appreciate and understand better Dante’s achievement as one of the major poets of the Christian Intellectual Tradition. This kind of theology does not seek to replace traditional Christian theology, but it is complementary to it. If our hearts are restless until they rest in God (as Augustine says in the first book of his Confessions), if God has written the Law on the hearts of the gentiles (Romans 2:15), then ordinary human life, without reference to systematic theology, points in the direction of the Christian mysteries at the center of Dante’s epic.

2. Dante’s Purgatorio: An Education in Mercy

I will begin with teaching Purgatorio to underclassmen, since I have done so much more frequently, and because this freshman introduction to Dante seems to me to be far more vital: the more freshmen who realize that the Commedia is a deep work that has continued relevance, even apart from its faith content, the better! In the first place, I should note that I do not teach Purgatorio entirely without context. I have my students read the first few cantos of Inferno to orient themselves to the work, followed by a brief summary of the canticle. Each semester I also tend to have a few students who have read Inferno in high school, but have never read Purgatorio. I can thus very quickly get the class to understand the basic premise of the economy of salvation and damnation: sin turns a person away from God and neighbor, and thus is a damnable offense. My religious students without much formation formulate Dante’s world in a typical Pelagian fashion: do good, and go to heaven; do evil, and go to hell. So far, so good. But what about a person who has sinned greatly, profoundly, but who repents at the last second? This tit for tat economy of salvation would seem to rule against such persons. This is why Antepurgatory is a vital place in the epic to begin questioning the simple (and technically heretical!) notion that good deeds earn salvation. Such a multitude of damned souls crosses into Inferno that one might well ask how anyone could be saved.4 When students get to Manfred (Purgatorio 3) and Buonconte da Montefeltro (Purgatorio 5), however, matters become more complicated. Manfred, the son of Emperor Frederick II, died excommunicated from the Church, a fate that one might think would damn him. While he recognizes his sins, his words speak of the immense Mercy shown to souls in Antepurgatory: “My sins were horrible,/but endless grace/has arms of generous goodness thrown so wide/they take in all who turn to them … no man so loses, by their curse’s power,/eternal love, that cannot return/so long as hope shows any green in flower” (Purgatorio 3.121-23, 133–35).5 Buonconte, the sinful son of the damned friar Guido da Montefeltro (Inferno 27), recounts a particularly vivid example of this kind of hope: his last-minute conversion on the battlefield:

… below the Casentino

Rushes a stream, the Archiano, born

In the Apennines above the Hermitage.

Just where it empties and its name turns vain

I arrived with an arrow in my throat,

Fleeing afoot and spattering the plain.

And there at once my sight and speech were gone.

I ended with ‘Maria’ on my lips

And fell, and left my flesh to lie alone.

It’s truth I tell—tell it to all alive!

God’s angel took me, and the one from Hell

Hollered, ‘O you from Heaven, why deprive

Me of his soul? He sheds one little tear

And you bear his immortal part away!’

(Purgatorio 5.94-107)6

If a single, sincere prayer while dying—whispering the name of the Mother of God as one bleeds out from a neck wound—is enough to save a person, then the question is changed: why isn’t everyone on the road to heaven? The Mercy of God found in Antepurgatory is profound, grace operating beyond natural justice. Here I can introduce students to the picture of a God Who is Mercy Itself. Recall that the angel at the gates of Purgatory proper is charged by St. Peter to let in too many, rather than too few: “Peter’s they [the keys] are, who said that I should err/rather in opening than in keeping shut,/so long as men should kneel before my feet” (Purgatorio 9.127-29).7 Whether students believe in Purgatory as an actual part of their religious faith, in the world of the Commedia Purgatory itself is a sign of God’s mercy: even if you threw your whole life away in vice, a little ray of hope is enough to put you on the road to heaven. The damned lack this hope (cf. the Gates of Hell: “abandon all hope, you who enter here”; lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate, Inferno 3.9). Apparently, even the smallest bit of this virtue is enough to be saved in the world of the Commedia.

This image of divinity leads naturally to questions about how we imagine ourselves living our lives. Even without a more specialized, Thomistic knowledge of virtue and vice, every person can consider this question: are there things that I do, ways I that live my life, that are unhealthy or counterproductive? Do I wish that I lived differently in certain aspects of my life? This way of phrasing these questions sounds similar to those found in “self-help” books, a genre with which the average undergraduate is likely familiar. If young adults begin to see Dante’s Purgatorio as focused on self-improvement, washing the grime away from the faces of the repentant so that their true selves can shine through, this presents them with a far more positive picture than that of a distant God who damns people for breaking rules: “My master gently ran his open hands/over the little tufts of grass, and I,/who understood the reason for his art,/Presented him my cheeks, still stained and teared./He wiped them, and at last discovered all/the color that the smoke of Hell had bleared” (Purgatorio 1.124-29).8 In reality, every soul in the Commedia is where she or he is by choice: the choice to be the best version of themselves or the choice to be something else.9 Put in those human terms, which are not terribly far, I think, from the text’s own vision, the paradox of God’s infinite Justice and infinite Mercy becomes a bit clearer for most underclassmen.

3. Free Will and Love: The Center of the Commedia

I also highlight the vital importance of the center of Dante’s Commedia to emphasize how the notions of free will and love give rise to the work’s entire economy of salvation. Like any liberally-educated medieval person, Dante appreciated mathematics, and attending to number in the Commedia yields much fruit. Purgatorio and Paradiso each have 33 cantos (a number with obvious Trinitarian overtones), while Inferno breaks this perfection with 34. That extra canto, however, means that the Commedia’s 100 cantos can be neatly divided into two sets of 50: Purgatorio 16 is the last canto of the first 50, while Purgatorio 17 is the first canto of the last 50. I impress on students that authors, particularly authors of Dante’s skill, do not write works haphazardly, and Purgatorio 16 and 17 can easily be seen as the “thumbnail” version of the argument of the work as a whole: that humans have free will, that God loves each human soul, and that every action, both good and evil, is caused by love.

In Purgatorio 16, Dante gives one of the most important speeches in the Commedia to Marco the Lombard, a man caught in the smoke of the circle of the wrathful. Dante the Pilgrim questions Marco on the cause of sin and evil: “but pray, show me the cause of all this sin,/that I may see it and reveal it, for/some blame the stars, some fortune here below” (Purgatorio 16.61-63).10 Marco answers him in one of the most beautiful and significant passages of the epic:

… “My brother,” he began,

“the world is blind, and it has been your home.

You living men attribute to the sky

The causes of all things, as if they moved

Ever and only by necessity.

That would destroy the freedom of your will,

Nor would it then be just to deal out joy

For doing well, or woe for doing ill.

The heavens give your movements their first nudge—

Not all your movements, but let’s grant that too—

Still, light is given that you may freely judge

And choose the good or evil; and should free will

Grow weary in the first battles with the stars,

Foster it well and it will win the day.

You men lie subject to that One who made

You free, a greater force, a better nature,

Who formed your minds without the planets’ aid.

Thus if this present world has gone askew,

Look to yourselves, in yourselves lies the cause”

(Purgatorio 16.65-83).11

This speech not only solidifies the logic of Christian economy for students; it further shows application to their own lives. How much do we imagine that we are in control of our own lives? In place of divine determinism, consider biological or sociological determinism: I ask my students to what extent their genes, their upbringings, their homes have now determined, for the rest of their lives, the choices they will make. Fairly quickly conversation reveals that while they think that these externals matter to varying degrees, even biology, psychology, and sociology majors want to say that they do have at least some freedom of choice, and they often point to case studies of exceptional individuals who rise above the bad hand dealt them by fate (they all read Frederick Douglass in our core curriculum). Dante calls us to responsibility and action, not blaming our problems solely on others. Bad leadership is a problem (Purgatorio 16.97-105), and there are limits to what an individual can do to change the community. At the same time, the individual can do something to face the evil in the world; as Marco notes, if there is evil, then the cause is in us. The call to action to realize that we are connected to and complicit in societal evils and the exhortation to choose to live differently resonate with students of diverse backgrounds, and are keys to understanding the Commedia as a whole.12

Turning to Purgatorio 17, we find Virgil’s masterful discourse on love, which explains much of the epic’s economy of salvation, but also raises further problems:

Not the Creator nor a single creature,

As you know, ever existed without love,

The soul’s love or the love that comes by nature.

The natural love is just and cannot rove.

The soul’s love strays if it desires what’s wrong

Or loves with too much strength, or not enough.

When towards its prime good it is led aright

And keeps good measure in the second goods,

It cannot be the cause of bad delight,

But when it twists to evil, or does not

Race for a good with the appropriate care,

The Potter finds rebellion in the pot.

Hence you can understand how love must be

The seedbed where all virtuous deeds must grow,

With every act that warrants punishment

(Purgatorio 17.91-105).13

Particularly by this point in the epic, students are primed to recognize the truth in Virgil’s words, and can supply their own examples. Do they have a friend or roommate in a dysfunctional romantic relationship? Of course they do! Do they love Netflix more than studying for a math exam? Of course they do! It does not take Christian faith to recognize the truth of ordered and disordered loves, and the prerogative to attempt to love well. But this very fact puts front and center another problem students often have with Dante’s epic: the damnation of Virgil.

4. Virgil’s Damnation and the Mystery of Salvation

Purgatorio does not make Virgil’s damnation easy for the reader. Granted, Limbo is a naturally pleasant place in which one can discuss philosophy and poetry for all eternity, but that technicality becomes much harder to bear as readers grow ever fonder of Virgil. They see Virgil relate to Dante more as a loving mentor in Purgatorio than as the stern father he sometimes was in Inferno. Particularly when students meet Cato and Statius in Purgatorio, they find Virgil’s damnation much more problematic. Cato was republican pagan suicide who is apparently going to heaven; allegorical readings aside, if he can be on the way to heaven, why not Virgil?14 Moreover, even though Statius was a Christian when living, Statius’s conversion story raises pathos for Virgil’s plight. The ultimate “fanboy” (as many of my students call him), Statius praises Virgil for Virgil’s central role in his conversion:

… “You were the one,”

Said he, “who first invited me to sip

Of the springs in the grottoes on Parnassus;

And then you lighted me the way to God.

You did as one upon the road at night

Who holds a torch that those behind may see,

Though he himself’s unaided by the light,

Saying, ‘From Heaven descends a newborn son;

The morning of humanity returns,

And a new age of justice has begun.’

A poet you made me, and a Christian too”

(Purgatorio 22.63-73).15

Dante’s Virgil was as perfect as a human being could be without divine revelation, and his writings actually inspired people to become Christians.16 In a theologically-curious passage, Virgil also demonstrates that the damned in Limbo can love the living; he says to Statius: “If virtue kindles love,/it kindles love in the beloved too,/provided that love’s flames can be observed. Thus from the day when Juvenal came down/to dwell with us upon the rim of Hell/and your affection was made known to me,/My well-wishing for you was such as no/man ever felt for one he’d never seen” (Purgatorio 22.10-17).17 The ability to love others is not typically a characteristic that Christians associate with the damned. If all this is the case, why is Virgil doomed to return to Hell?

Dante the Poet cultivates the reader’s attachment to Virgil to the very end, with Virgil’s poignant last words and his shocking absence. Virgil’s final words to Dante the Pilgrim make reference to Dante’s initial subjection of his will in Inferno 2,18 indicating that Virgil’s guidance has come to completion: “The temporal and eternal fires, my son,/you have now seen, and you have reached a part/where I discern no further on my own./I’ve led you here by strength of mind, and art; take your own pleasure for your leader now…. No longer wait for what I do or say./Your judgment now is free and whole and true;/to fail to follow its will would be to stray./Lord of yourself I crown and miter you” (Purgatorio 27.127-31, 139–42).19 While Virgil has no more words in the Commedia, his continued presence through Purgatorio 28-30 lulls readers into a false sense that he will remain indefinitely. I often need to direct students to take notice of Virgil’s departure, coming, as it does, right before the climax of Purgatorio, the entrance of Beatrice:

I turned left—as a little child will do

Wide-eyed and running over to his mama

When he’s afraid of something or he’s hurt,

To say to Virgil, “Not a drop of blood

Runs in my veins that isn’t trembling now!

I know the traces of the ancient flame—”

But Virgil had deprived us of his light,

Virgil the sweetest father, Virgil, he

In whom I trusted that I might be healed,

Nor all the world our mother Eve once lost

Could keep my cheeks that had been cleansed with dew

From darkening again with bitter tears

(Purgatorio 30.43-54).20

Even in the presence of his Lady, Dante the Pilgrim weeps over Virgil’s sudden absence, marring the countenance that Virgil himself cleansed back in the first canto of Purgatorio. I ask my students whether they were satisfied with Virgil’s departure, and most of them are not. For a character as good as Virgil, they find it odd that he just slips away without another word. I point out to them, however, that this is actually quite realistic. What if the last words your best friend said to you are the last words she or he will ever say to you? What if the last time you met is the last time? I can say with 100% certainty that everyone in my classroom will die at some point in time, and while we live as though we will never die (a phenomenon that a Christian may use to suggest the reality of life eternal), we all know that at some point this life will end. Furthermore, we have no way of knowing when exactly that will be. This mediation—again on a very human mystery—tends to lead to excellent conversation, which ties back to the question of how we live. How might we live differently if we were aware of the fact, the fact, that we are not sure whether or not we have seen our friends and family for the last time? That is a lesson that Virgil can teach to anyone.

It does not, however, deal with the problem of Virgil’s damnation, since many of my keener students note that Marco Lombard’s speech raises a troubling problem: if free will is so important, how can God hold Virgil responsible for something that was completely out of his control, the fact that he happened to be a gentile, born before the coming of Christ?21 Answering that question requires me to jump ahead briefly into Paradiso to consider the vexing questions raised by the salvation of two different pagans, Trajan and Ripheus. I begin by letting the students know that there are pagans in heaven, which initially only infuriates them more: if Trajan and Ripheus, why not Virgil?! My initial response is to return them to considerations of human mystery. Dante is a master at balancing the specific truths known through Christian revelation with the mystery that God transcends any human knowledge or formulation: the “rules” exist, but they also can be transcended, a notion that many find hard to navigate. An apt analogy for students is to consider their own futures. They likely have an idea of what they want to major in and what they want to do after graduation. Let’s say that we have Martha, who is majoring in Biology and wants to go to medical school to be an oncologist. That’s fantastic, and Martha has good reason, based on what she knows of life at this moment, to imagine that her knowledge of the future is accurate. A bit of reflection, however, reveals that this accurate image of the future is not complete or infallible: what if she finds out that she hates medical school? What if next year she discovers a new passion that she currently does not recognize? What if she finds a career path that did not exist five years ago? This might seem like a tangent, but it actually gets at a vital concept in the Christian tradition: we recognize both that we have accurate knowledge, but that that knowledge is always imperfectly grasping at something mysterious.

Returning to Paradiso 19 and 20, the answer to the question of Ripheus and Trajan reinforces the importance of free will, loving community, and the self-recognized limits of Christian teaching. Ripheus is a real conundrum, simply justified through some special grace.22 In the case of Ripheus, all we can say is that there are simply some mysteries in life. Trajan, however, is a more interesting figure, since his salvation was the result of a pious Christian praying something apparently impossible: that a dead pagan emperor receive salvation. According to legend, St. Gregory the Great’s prayers impelled God to raise Trajan briefly from the dead, enough time to receive baptism:

To flesh and bone

The one returned from never-repenting Hell,

Of living hope, with power to impel

Prayers to God that he might rise once more,

And live, and so be moved to willing well.

Returned unto his flesh the briefest hour,

The glorious spirit I’ve been speaking of

Believe in Him and sought His help and power,

And in believing, kindled into love

So true, the second time he fell asleep

He merited his coming to this joy

(Paradiso 20.106-17).23

It seems rather odd that prayer can violate the natural order of life and death. But perhaps it should not be so surprising. In the same canto as this account of the salvation of these two noble pagans, the Eagle, made up of the souls of the just in the sphere of Jupiter, has this to say about prayer:

The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence

From living hope and burning charity

That overcome the will of the divine,

Not as a man will overcome a man—

The divine wins because it would be won,

And won, it wins with its benignity

(Paradiso 20.94-99).24

This is an astonishing passage. When humans pray to God, God loves to have His will overthrown. Particularly for Christian students, this passage is arresting: if we choose to love through prayer, God will change His will. The question of Virgil’s status, therefore, becomes not so much why he is in Hell, but why we are not praying for his salvation! According to the Paradiso, God is not bound by His own norms, and perhaps we should be more bold in our loving prayers as members of the Communion of Saints. Lest we think too highly of ourselves, though, recall the words the Eagle has for Christians who in their lives are less faithful than such noble pagans: … Many now cry, ‘Christ, Christ!’/Who’ll be less near to him on Judgment Day/than will the one who never knew Christ” (Paradiso 19.106-08).25 It appears as though Dante is working towards something that my Catholic students articulate as Baptism by Desire, a concept about which Thomas Aquinas wrote, but which was not official Church doctrine in Dante’s lifetime.26 This final piece of the puzzle should leave students, regardless of their faith, with some taste of the complexity of Christian thought, and hopefully an appreciation of its positivity and nuance, seen strictly through a humanist lens.

5. Paradiso: Writing about the Inexpressible

These sorts of questions and topics can be used for undergraduates at any phase of their development to help reveal the perennial relevance of the Commedia, regardless of the reader’s faith. Before concluding, however, I should also talk about an additional consideration I have when teaching Paradiso to upperclassmen. In my experience, Inferno and Purgatorio are easy “sells” for reasons I have outlined above. Paradiso, however, is hard going. As one student put it, the problem is that this canticle is an epic without conflict, and conflict is what makes for good stories (like Inferno and Purgatorio, which conform to the “hero’s journey”). I mused on that excellent observation, and reformulated it this way: the “conflict” in Paradiso is the conflict with our own mind and human language to grasp and express mysteries that, by definition, transcend human reason and language. My students were not initially impressed with that formulation: if that is the case, then why is Dante even trying? I pointed out how wildly experimental Paradiso is: Dante begins coining new words to try to grasp the realities he is seeing (transuminar/transhumanize; s’addua/twoed; s’inluia/in-Hims; s’invera/entruthed;).27 In that regard, he shows some kinship with James Joyce, a point that some English majors appreciated. At the end of the day, though, Joyce is still writing about observable human reality: why read a work that is trying to express non-observable, inhuman realities?

When confronted with this question, I decided to put Dante aside briefly and consider a sonnet from 1923 by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,

And lay them prone upon the earth and cease

To ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere

In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese

Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,

When first the shaft into his vision shone

Of light anatomized! Euclid alone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

(Millay 2002)

This sonnet itself requires some careful analysis and explication. Euclid is studied in one of our Core mathematics courses, but most undergraduates do not appreciate the beauty of points, lines, and theorems. I need to gloss a bit: what is a geometrical figure? Something that has no physical reality: no color, texture, smell, or mass. Even the figures are simply visualizations for utterly abstract concepts (as our students discover in Plato’s Republic). And yet the logic of how axioms build on one another into theorems and proofs is beautiful, according to St. Vincent Millay. Pure logic, not bound by earth or language, has a beauty all its own, and this beauty is worthy of being commemorated in a sonnet. Moreover, continuing on my mathematical riff, I note that we know that there are such things as irrational numbers. Phi, pi, and the diagonal of a square (the alogon of Plato’s Meno) are some with which most of them are familiar. Leave faith aside: we know through reason that there are mathematical entities that go beyond reason and language, and that these entities exist in the world: look at any spiral or circle. If the subject of literature is life, then why not write sonnets about irrational numbers or the unobservable inner workings of black holes?28 Some people become English majors because they dislike mathematics and science; I try to show them that real English majors should not discount the poetic potential of these subjects. Dante certainly didn’t: consider Statius’ treatise on hylomorphic embryology in Purgatorio 25! These considerations were not entirely successful at impressing on my students the validity and importance of such apophatic poetry, but most of them were willing to grant that Dante was likely doing more in Paradiso than they could appreciate, which is a solid first step.

The last step, however, was to connect the great Italian poet to the struggles of young writers. Ultimately, by Paradiso 33, language utterly fails Dante, and his vision is impossible to put even into newly-invented words. At this point, epic begins to fall into lyric, and ends only in vision and silence:

Alas how feeble language is, how lame

Beside my thought!—and, for what I was shown,

To call thought ‘small’ would be too great a claim.

O Light that dwell within Thyself alone,

Who alone know Thyself, are known, and smile

With Love upon the Knowing and the Known!

That circle which appeared—in my poor style—

Like a reflected radiance in Thee,

After my eyes had studied it awhile,

Within, and in its own hue, seemed to be

Tinted with the figure of a Man,

And so I gazed on it absorbedly…

Here ceased the powers of my high fantasy

(Paradiso 33.121-32, 142).29

Here my English majors who were creative writers began to articulate an understanding of the mystery at the heart of Dante’s poetics. All authors struggle to find the right words for the phenomena they describe, and the description of a phenomenon is not identical to it. Think of the experience of falling in love: you could be the most eloquent poet in the language, but the fullness of that experience (a mysterious and divine experience, if you are Dante falling in love with Beatrice!) will ever elude being encapsulated in limited human language. Apophatic theology can be a hard concept for even well-formed, believing Christians to grasp; in Dante’s final struggle to express himself, even non-religious students began to understand the importance of his struggle.30 Before Paradiso, Dante did not appear to struggle at all with his art, and was even a bit vainglorious.31 Dante’s failure here resonated with the experiences of young writers, and even those students who had been hard on Dante (both the Poet and the Pilgrim) up to this point were able to give a bit of sympathy for and appreciation of the sheer achievement of the Commedia, the great epic of the Christian Intellectual Tradition.

6. Conclusions

Teaching what Dante called “the sacred poem” (“lo sacrato poema,” Paradiso 23.62)32 is never easy, and any approach necessarily leaves much to be desired. I hope, however, that I have shared some helpful ways to bring Dante’s essentially theological poetics into a solidly human realm, in order to reach students of any faith (or no faith). I should close by noting that this pedagogy is clearly not a violation of Dante’s own epic, since what do we see in the Second Person of the Trinity?—“la nostra effige”: “our [human] figure” (Paradiso 33.131).