Although the book under review appeared in this English translation only earlier this year, the original French work, Dante le théologien, was published in 1935. Most Dante scholars, I suspect, will have been introduced to it through a critique in the first chapter of Étienne Gilson’s Dante et la philosophie. [1] I still remember when, as a graduate student starting to work through classic works of Dante scholarship, I began Gilson’s work and was surprised to see that the first, lengthy, chapter (running to some 82 pages in the English translation) consisted of a detailed and dismissive critique of Mandonnet’s book, which I did not know. As George Corbett points out in his “Editorial Introduction,” while Gilson’s book was translated into English “and remains a staple reference point for students and scholars of Dante, Mandonnet’s book...was neglected and largely forgotten” (17). Corbett believes that this neglect is unfortunate; this translation is an attempt to make the work more widely accessible and re-introduce it into the world of Dante scholarship.
The book is edited and translated by Corbett and Patricia Kelly. It’s clear from the “Note on the Translation,” that it is primarily Kelly’s work; Corbett edited the translation and was responsible for incorporating “many of Madonnet’s expansive footnotes and often haphazard referencing system in the main text” (15), and he also wrote the introduction. Kelly claims to “remain a Dantean novice,” and so she relied on Corbett for guidance into the vast minefield of Dante scholarship. I was unable to consult the original French text, and so I cannot comment closely on the accuracy of the translation. Nevertheless, Kelly has done an admirable job of rendering Mandonnet’s French into accessible and fluid English prose.
In the “Editorial Introduction” Corbett lays out the case for translating Mandonnet’s work some 90 years after it first appeared. He first provides a brief biography of the author, who “came to Dante as an outstanding medieval historian” (18). In his work on Dante, Mandonnet “sought to use historical and scientific method, and his deep knowledge of theology, to aid in the proper exposition of Dante’s work,” since Catholic scholars of the time felt that there was “widespread ignorance of the Catholic faith and her theology amongst students and professors of Dante” (20). Corbett then provides an overview of the current state of Dante studies and suggests some reasons why Mandonnet may offer a useful corrective to many norms in the field.
Mandonnet’s study is divided into four unequal parts. The first, and longest, concerns “The Author of the Commedia,” and it is in this section that we find Mandonnet’s best known and most controversial argument: that Dante was a cleric. Mandonnet does not argue, to be clear, that Dante became a member of the clergy but instead that he entered minor orders but stopped short of taking final vows and ultimately abandoned his clerical status. His justification for this claim lies primarily in Dante’s extensive learning, including his fluency in Latin, which for Mandonnet can only be explained by the possibility that Dante was “a cleric at some point,” since “only churchmen engaged in study” (47). He finds further evidence for Dante’s clerical status in his works, although in most cases the allegorical readings make sense only if one has already assumed Dante’s clerical status (at one point Mandonnet refers to “the interpretative key of his clerical status” [92]).
The second part, “The Purpose,” the briefest part of the study, argues that Dante thought of himself as having three vocations: poet, teacher, and Christian preacher. The writing of theCommedia fuses these three vocations into one, creating “simultaneously a poem, a theological summa, and a passionate exhortation to conversion and practising good works” (114). “The Form” is the third section and is the second longest of the book; here Mandonnet lays out his principles of interpretation, drawing on the writings of Aquinas to do so. The fourth part, “The Matter,” makes the case that we must use theological principles in interpreting the Commedia. The book concludes with an appendix in which Mandonnet analyzes one symbol in detail, that of “ruins,” to show how his interpretive principles work in practice.
This brief overview provides some idea of the range of the study as well as its primary concerns. But rather than responding to each part and each chapter, a more useful approach may be to discuss the three areas in Dante studies that Corbett identifies and argues deserve a re-consideration in the light of Mandonnet’s work. These areas, with some parenthetical indication of Corbett’s critique of the status quo, are: the overall hermeneutic approach to the poem (there is an over-emphasis on the literal sense of Dante’s poem at the expense of its allegorical meaning); the relationship between Dante’s and Aquinas’s thought (the current view that Dante departs widely from Thomism is mistaken); and the status of Beatrice (the emphasis on Beatrice as a historical woman rather than a symbol is misguided). I will focus first on Mandonnet’s hermeneutic principles.
As a general rule, Mandonnet believes that we should read the poem allegorically, pointing to passages such as Inf. 9.61-63, where Dante instructs us to “observe the teaching that is hidden here / beneath the veil of verses so obscure” (Mandelbaum trans.[2]). For Mandonnet, this is not isolated instruction applying only to a particular episode, but a general hermeneutic principle. The poem should be considered an “allegory of the poets” rather than an “allegory of the theologians,” to use Dante’s terminology from book two of the Convivio;the literal sense is only important as it reveals the allegorical truth underlying it. Dante’s allegory functions in the manner of personification allegory, with one meaning assigned to each figure or symbol. As Mandonnet writes in chapter five, “Dante’s words in every statement can have only a single figurative sense” (136).
Other hermeneutic principles that become clear in the course of the study include the following:
· The trinitarian principle of “three-in-one” is a general principle of interpretation that should be applied to the entire poem.
· Dante is utterly consistent throughout his career as a poet. All of his poems are, and were intended to be, allegorical, a principle that applies not only to the Commedia but also to the poems explicated in the Convivio and the Vita Nuova. Dante never reconsiders or reinterprets his own work.
· Dante’s poetry is written for theological reasons, or, as Mandonnet states late in the study, “the [Commedia] is above all a theological work, or, more accurately, theology itself” (182). Dante wrote the poem, that is, as a way of writing theology.
· Mandonnet does not see the poem as a dramatic work filled with characters whose views may or may not represent the views of Dante the poet. For example, as part of his argument that we cannot view Beatrice as an actual woman, even a saintly woman who is deceased, he points to Sordello’s words in Purgatorio 8 that claim, “how brief, in woman, is love’s fire—when not / rekindled frequently by eye or touch.” For Mandonnet, this is a straightforward expression of Dante’s own view (“Dante did not have an exaggerated idea about the quality of love in women, and made exceptions for none” [83]); he does not consider the possibility that Dante may have given Sordello an idea that he did not share.
· The context of Dante’s writing is invariably theological. This orientation at times reveals blind spots, particularly in the tradition of vernacular poetry that Dante inherited. For example, Mandonnet discusses St. Lucy’s words in Inferno 2.104-05 to Beatrice, that Dante “loved you so / that—for your sake—he left the vulgar crowd.” For Mandonnet this can only mean that Dante for love of Christian revelation became a cleric, since “to suggest that Dante had gone forth from the common troop by falling in love? That is hardly departing from the common herd” (87). But in the tradition of what we now call courtly love, falling in love was reserved for an elite and was not open to the common herd.
Mandonnet’s treatment of what Corbett identifies as the second issue—the relationship between the views of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante—seems to me the most engaging. There are times when Mandonnet’s erudition brings additional, theological context to an important issue. For example, when considering how Aquinas’s views of the relationship between poetry and theology are relevant to Dante, he turns not to what is now a standard passage in the Summa theologiae (1a, 1), but to an intriguing section from Aquinas’s commentary on the Sentences, which brings additional subtlety and insight. Nevertheless, important research over the last several years, (see, for example, the volume Dante and Heterodoxy [3]) has made the claim that Dante invariably follows Aquinas’s thought difficult to sustain. While Dante certainly follows Catholic orthodoxy in many matters, there are also many, in my view, where he draws on other, less orthodox thinkers, or where he charts his own course.
Mandonnet’s views concerning the third issue, the status of Beatrice, are also controversial. In the “Note on the Translation,” Kelly acknowledges that to our ears, “a French Religious born in the mid-nineteenth century may appear occasionally sexist, somewhat archaic, and often rather prolix.” She asks readers “to appreciate that he was a man of his time” (15). This is a fair request, and so while making no comments about the author as a human being, I nevertheless feel it is also fair to point out when his assumptions impact his interpretation, and this, I think, is the case for his view of Beatrice. For him, it is unthinkable that Beatrice (or indeed any of Dante’s women) should be considered a “real” woman; she must be read only as a symbol. He makes a number of arguments in defense of this position (e.g., that Dante reserves the term “femmina” for actual women), but for me the underlying reason becomes clear when he states, “In Dante’s mind, it would have been a profanation to make a real woman the symbol of Christian Revelation” (67). Perhaps one sign of Dante’s heterodoxy is that he would indeed choose a “real” woman to serve as an authority figure and to symbolize something like Christian Revelation.
In spite of my disagreement with many of Mandonnet’s arguments, Corbett and Kelly have indeed done us a service in making Dante the Theologian more widely available and accessible. Encountering a differing view from a learned and able reader from an earlier time helped me to clarify and think through my own assumptions about the poem. As I did so, I concluded that the difference between my approach and Mandonnet’s lies not so much in how to interpret Dante’s literal sense or in what to make of Beatrice, or rather not only in those things. The primary difference instead lies in how to understand the kind of poem that Dante intended the Commedia to be and how he saw himself as an author.
In his overview of the state of Dante studies in the “Editorial Introduction,” Corbett identifies Bruno Nardi and Charles Singleton as two prominent critics who were mistaken about Dante’s poetic technique. For both of these scholars, Dante wrote according to the “allegory of the theologians” rather than the “allegory of the poets,” which for Corbett leads to an overvaluation of the literal sense, and so Mandonnet’s alternate view provides a useful corrective. For Mandonnet, as for Corbett, the Commedia is an“allegory of the poets,” and the poem’s literal sense may be discarded as a “beautiful lie”; Dante’s authorial persona therefore is consistent across the Convivio and the Commedia. For readers such as myself, however, Dante’s self-conception as a writer varies across his works; to use a term from narrative theory, the implied author in the Commedia differs fundamentally from that in the Convivio. In the earlier treatise, he is the humble teacher of philosophy, gathering up the crumbs from the tables of his philosophical masters and transmitting them to those hungry for knowledge. His interest in explicating his own poetry is to get behind the “beautiful lie” to the philosophical truth underneath. In the Commedia, however, Dante frequently presents himself as a privileged truth teller, that is, as a prophet. [4] Dante’s statement in the Convivio that his poetry works according to the “allegory of the poets” does not apply to the Commedia.
It is telling that Mandonnet never analyzes, or even mentions, passages such as Inferno 19 or Paradiso 27, where Dante the pilgrim in the first case and St. Peter in the second launch into blistering critiques of the contemporary church in speeches that follow the conventions of biblical, prophetic speech. Similarly, while he devotes several pages to an analysis of the cantos of the Earthly Paradise at the end of Purgatorio, Mandonnet does not consider the final two cantos of the canticle, which contain a troubling account of the history of the church based on imagery derived from the Apocalypse and a prophetic speech by Beatrice, in which she condemns the current state of the church and promises divine intervention in the near future. Ultimately, it seems to me that Mandonnet understands Dante as a writer who fits comfortably into the mainstream of late medieval Catholic thought. But for me and perhaps many other readers, this understanding does not match our experience of reading this often-unsettling poet.
--------
Notes:
1. I read the English translation published as Etienne Gilson, Dante and Philosophy, trans. David Moore (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1949; rpt. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963).
2. I have used Mandelbaum’s translation throughout this review, although I have altered it occasionally so that it more closely adheres to the original Italian.
3. Maria Luisa Aridizzone, ed., Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptations of 13th Century Radical Thought (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).
4. To be clear about my own position, I do not hold with Bruno Nardi’s claim that Dante actually saw in vision the all the details of his poem. Instead, I agree with Teodolinda Barolini’s reformulation of Nardi’s position that “Dante self-consciously used the means of fiction—poetic and narrative strategies—in the service of a vision he believed to be true.” See The Undivine “Comedy”: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 11.