As has been written before in this publication (review of God, Mystery and Mystification, New Blackfriars, Volume 102 Issue 1097), Denys Turner is an extremely gifted pedagogue. And in this volume, he continues to embody his gift for paideia, here particularly appropriately as he writes about the depth of transformation expressed and enabled through Dante’s incomparable Divine Comedy. Through this salvific metanoia, Dante’s pilgrim-self moves, and moves us, from mid-life perplexity, through the closed circles of hell, into the effortful but upward spiral of purgatory, and in flight through paradise towards an instant of perfected vision and ecstatic silence.
The premise of Dante the Theologian is that the Commedia is both a poetic masterpiece and an extremely rich work of theology, and that it is the one through the other, each inseparably. This is because it is engaged (as poetry and as theology) in a common tertium quid that is from a Christian perspective the telos of both: that is to say the work and understanding of salvific transformation, which Turner terms the ‘essential task’. Dante’s work, Turner thus argues, cannot be understood outside of its anagogical intention, and in that angagogical intention it is intensely, in content yes but above all in the contentful proffer of its form and arc, theological. It is thinking, and creating, within the reality of divine promise and human participation in its fulfillment. What is more, as poetry it has a particular capacity to take quasi-sacramental form, that is to say effect what it signifies in its dramatic and hence ‘lived’ equivalence given to the reader in the duration and extent of the poem.
This premise takes its context from Turner’s affirmation – as he looks back on his own career from the 1960s to the present day – of the need for theology to continue to enrich its contemporary discourse through an ever-widening understanding of its scope. Thinking particularly about the medieval era, this has meant the fresh recognition as theologically fruitful and serious of all kinds of confessional, vernacular, and literary forms: the prayerful, the ‘mystical’, the meditative and the poetic. In this context, the present volume completes a kind of trilogy of works on medieval theologians, beginning with Julian of Norwich and Thomas Aquinas, now moving to Dante Alighieri.
Speaking to upcoming scholars of Dante, and of literature and theology, for them it almost ‘goes without saying’ that we should understand Dante as a theologian by way of poetry. Fresh collaborations between theologians and scholars of Dante have been opening up powerful new readings on similar terms. Denys Turner contributed to the 2003 Conference papers, which appeared in a 2010 volume edited by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne on Dante and theology; this approach was followed the Vertical Readings in Dante series in Cambridge and its edited volume, and Montemaggi’s 2016 monograph Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology. Robin Kirkpatrick’s immensely theologically literate commentary in his Penguin translation and edition should also be mentioned. Turner very much admits he is influenced and inspired by all these. However, this work represents a significant contribution: both in being addressed to a non-Dantisti audience, and in the sheer pleasure of the erudition and explanation from such a theologically literate and literarily sensitive thinker. However this work represents a significant contribution in being addressed to a non-Dantisti audience, and, resonating very much also with Mark Vernon’s 2021 Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide to the Spiritual Journey, a fresh invitation to be changed by our reading of the Commedia.
Turner traces the overall narrative of conversion and transformation, finding in this parallels with Augustine’s Confessions. The book draws out the theology of the three cantiche at the level of thinking about what kind of ‘factional’ place, theologically speaking, each describes and hence what Dante is saying about the nature of sin, repentance, eternal life. Appropriately in the context of New Blackfriars, and of Turner as a Roman Catholic theologian, Aquinas is the most consistent theological comparison point. This establishes an implicit dialectic between what is possible in Dante’s poetic form and what we find in the discourse of scholastic theology and interpretation thereof. What are found in the latter as tensions or inconsistencies (Turner explores an intriguing one on whether there can be full ‘persons’ in Hell, if moral choice is therein foreclosed) can be played out within Dante’s poetry as productive paradoxes: in ways which retain narrative consistency whilst occupying the ‘negative capability’ of literature. In his treatment of Inferno, Turner speculates that it might represent an ‘anti-narrative’ of a place which strains away from its own stated existence. It is the location of sin as a perverse and fantastical understanding of reality re-experienced in closed loops; full of fantasists trapped by the logic of their own wilfully limited desires. Moreover, in the context of the poem, it is permeable: Dante’s pilgrim-self can and does travel through it (in Beatrice’s footprints, which themselves follow the Holy Saturday path trodden by Christ; the three days of the triduum are the liturgical temporal frame of Inferno). This renders it, alongside every location in the poem, from the perspective that we remain on earth as we read and Dante as he writes, more purgatorial than hellish. Poetically, experientially for the reader, it can hence only ever be a possible Hell – and plausibly there are hints throughout that its suspensions are not final.
Turner argues that sacramental language forms a plausible analogy for Dante’s project of poesis looking to obtain what it describes. I wonder whether thinking of the poem as a liturgical script might prove a more fruitful frame for this question of whether the poetry has ‘rhetorical’ or ‘sacramental’ efficacy. Liturgy carries within its frame of religious practice understandings of temporality, language, action, and gesture as having sacramental weight. It also admits of a multiplicity of generic positions and inhabiting of positions: christological and viatorial. Like Dante’s comedy itself, it brings within its compass poetry, gesture, movement, prayer, and song and unites present historical time to angelic aevum and to supertemporal eternity. Viewing the poem through this lens might also go someway towards resolving the long-held tension of Dante’s own distinction between the ‘allegory of the theologians’ and the ‘allegory of the poets’ (the former’s veilings carrying faithfully with them the precious kernel of truth; the latter’s fictions only capable of gesturing or imitating truth) with the truth claims of his own poem. Helena Phillips-Robins is someone who has recently engaged brilliantly and originally with liturgy within the Commedia (Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s Commedia, 2021); but perhaps there is space for viewing the whole of the poem as generically and philosophically ‘liturgical’.
The other query one might have about the book is what definition it discovers for poetry. Turner is most famous for his treatment of apophatic theology (The Darkness of God), and these emphases and ideas still govern his thought here. In a sense in this book, the term ‘poetry’ sometime seems a cipher for sayable unsayability. It speaks, and has its own theological project for Turner, through the paradox of its rich affirmative quality, its cataphatic telling and realising of character, place and event; of image and analogy, all of which nonetheless finally and continuously admits its own inadequacy. What Turner understandably deals with much less is poetry’s techne, musical and linguistic, and its practice and profession. Turner is writing about poetry in a broad and to some extent contingently circumscribed way as the complement and sister to all true theology, but he is also of course writing of Dante’s poetry, and of confessional poetry, rather than the poetic enterprise as such and what its efforts and aspirations with regards to language might entail or reveal about reality. We might wonder about this, both in terms of unpacking how Dante is doing theology in prosody and at the level of the line, and in terms of understanding the relationship between theology and poetry per se.
The pitch of this book is catholic in the small ‘c’ sense: generous and essayistic, rather than narrowly academic or forbidding. Perhaps one of the book’s richest gifts of the book is that Turner is such an authentic pilgrim in his writing. The ideas come to life and are so clearly communicated because the reader senses that he is, in the model of Augustine and of Dante, personally wrestling with them. Turner, as he travels amongst and converses with his many interlocutors from the ancient to the present day is at once Virgil in his knowledge and instruction and Beatrice in his richly intentional love for Dante, for the reader, and for God.
