Intelligent design.

Understanding Dante

John A. Scott 

University of Notre Dame Press, $35, 504 pp.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante--greatest of Christian poets--attempts something most recent theology and literary theory would tell him he cannot and, therefore, should not do. "The aim of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness," he writes in a famous letter. In other words, he had primarily a practical, not an aesthetic or contemplative purpose. Dante was no crude moralist, and the same letter explains his great poem is "polysemous," roughly meaning readable according to the four senses of Scripture in medieval exegesis, with additional elements proper to a work of its kind. But there is no getting around the fact that the most accomplished Christian practitioner of the literary arts squarely puts damnation and salvation before all other considerations in the reading of one of the greatest poems ever written.

This runs so contrary to modern notions that even another great Christian poet, T. S. Eliot, conceded in a famous essay on Dante that philosophical and theological material may be included in literature as "matter for inspection" though not as argument per se. Most writers throughout history, however, would have sided with Dante. We tend to shy away from didactic literature, even when we agree with its aims, because we have abundant evidence that art serving arguments, particularly religious arguments, is often bad art. The lamentable truth is that most art, didactic and not, religious and secular, is bad anyway. It is difficult to say exactly what lifts the works of our hands above our usual mediocrity, but whatever it is Dante had it, whatever his intentions.

The particular character of the Comedy (it was given the adjective Divine later by acclamation, not by Dante) thus requires us to read very carefully and to look into subjects--religious, historical, philosophical, scientific, geographical--that we do not usually need to understand other poems. Most of us make our first acquaintance with Dante via English translations with substantial notes, without which we'd be lost. Even after long study and many rereadings, outside props are still a great help. Dante knew as much and wrote commentaries on several of his own poems. Systematic commentaries on the Comedy began shortly after Dante's death; his own son Piero wrote a good one. But after seven centuries, the sheer bulk of "helps" has become an obstacle of its own.

The latest entry into this vast field--a very good, almost ideal one--is John A. Scott's Understanding Dante, which is part of the distinguished series on the poet published by the University of Notre Dame Press. Anyone who has tried to explain Dante to an American audience knows that the first problem is range finding. You cannot expect much detailed knowledge of anything, including the Bible, from American readers. In presenting the basic knowledge needed to explicate various works, however, the overall picture that Dante cared most about is often buried. Scott strikes a wonderful balance throughout his text. He devotes 350 pages to a careful but lively reading of all of Dante, with just enough reference to scholarly sources and current debates to lead his readers into the richness of the poet's work. But Scott also provides a kind of critical survey of secondary material in an additional hundred pages of footnotes, bibliographies, and indexes for anyone who wants to dive deeper. The result is not exactly an introduction to Dante. You need some familiarity with Dante's work to make good use of this volume. But this is a book to put on the shelf alongside Dante and to consult whenever you read the great Florentine.

Scott's genial good sense is reflected in every detail of his text, not least in the proportions of space he devotes to various issues. Like other books, Scott's takes us through the Vita Nuova (which he somewhat eccentrically has decided should be called Vita Nova), the canzoni, Dante's treatises on the vernacular, philosophy, and the monarchy, as well as the Comedy. But every page bursts with insights and brief accounts of disputed interpretations without ever feeling forced. In fact, Scott communicates a real enthusiasm about everything he touches by keeping the ultimate focus on the overall significance of Dante in his day and ours. Most nontechnical books on Dante, for example, shy away from drier questions like versification. Scott tackles the subject and in two pages not only explains the technicalities, but shows why even such small matters have larger significance in Dante's great design.

He is also an astute literary critic. For instance, he writes of the well known episode of the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca: "If ever it was true to say that language reveals the person, then we may claim that probably no other writer can rival Dante's ability to evoke a complex, lifelike personality with amazing verbal economy." Scott reminds us that Francesca, a figure who bulks large in subsequent literary history, appears in only the second half of Inferno V, and that "Dante has given us not a mere sketch but an unforgettable, fully realized portrait of a noblewoman with a tragic flaw that seals her damnation in the space of fewer than two hundred words." This powerful economy of means was partly made possible by Dante's brilliant decision to convey his encyclopedic learning largely through dramatic encounters. Just as in real life, religious and other truths are most deeply brought home to us in interactions with people, so in the Comedy's fictional world people from the Bible, classical literature and history, the Middle Ages, and Dante's own time draw him into the divine drama. "No poem is more firmly set in time and eternity," Scott rightly says.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of Scott's book, though, is his calm formulation of the truly radical and unexpected nature of Dante's Comedy without the slightest hint of any special pleading. Dante deliberately chose to write in Italian at a time when the vernacular was thought unsuitable for learning. He turned his native tongue into a lively instrument for bringing the "bread of angels" to everyone, young and old, male and female, capable of digesting it. By contrast, under humanistic snobbery, Latin became a hyper refined and "dead" language. After centuries of squabbles over the respective jurisdictions of pope and emperor, Dante simply rejected any temporal role for the papacy. The poet went so far as to call pope and emperor "two suns," a clear rejection of the traditional sun/moon imagery that made the secular power a derivative of papal power. At the same time, Dante is neither a secularist nor an early humanist in the usual senses of those words. He has great confidence in the ultimate compatibility of faith and reason, but makes some surprising assertions. The emperor needs to be an independent power because God willed that the Roman Empire establish order and good manners throughout the world. The secular order, however, should be modest to the point of asceticism.

Scott gets all this and much more exactly right, reminding us that Dante railed against the greed and egotism of churchmen, but condemned in maybe even harsher terms the wealth in Florence that we see as leading to the Renaissance, but he saw as the cause of moral and political decadence. In doing all this, Scott keeps us constantly aware of Dante's perennial literary importance, but also of his permanent relevance to the drama of human life on earth.

Robert Royal is president of the Faith & Reason Institute, and author of Dante Aligieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality (Crossroad).