Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante's Commedia

By Helena Phillips-Robins

This study explores ways in which Dante presents liturgy as enabling humans to encounter God.

In Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s “Commedia,” Helena Phillips-Robins explores for the first time the ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia. The study draws on largely untapped thirteenth-century sources to reconstruct how the songs and prayers performed in the Commedia were experienced and used in late medieval Tuscany. Phillips-Robins shows how in the Commedia Dante refashions religious practices that shaped daily life in the Middle Ages and how Dante presents such practices as transforming and sustaining relationships between humans and the divine. The study focuses on the types of engagement that Dante’s depictions of liturgical performance invite from the reader. Based on historically attentive analysis of liturgical practice and on analysis of the experiential and communal nature of liturgy, Phillips-Robins argues that Dante invites readers themselves to perform the poem’s liturgical songs and, by doing so, to enter into relationship with the divine. Dante calls not only for readers’ interpretative response to the Commedia but also for their performative and spiritual activity.

Focusing on Purgatorio and Paradiso, Phillips-Robins investigates the particular ways in which relationships both between humans and between humans and God can unfold through liturgy. Her book includes explorations of liturgy as a means of enacting communal relationships that stretch across time and space; the Christological implications of participating in liturgy; the interplay of the personal and the shared enabled by the language of liturgy; and liturgy as a living out of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. The book will interest students and scholars of Dante studies, medieval Italian literature, and medieval theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780268200701

Helena Phillips-Robins

Helena Phillips-Robins is a research fellow of Selwyn College, University of Cambridge.

Book preview

Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s Commedia

THE WILLIAM AND KATHERINE DEVERS SERIES

IN DANTE AND MEDIEVAL ITALIAN LITERATURE

Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr., and Christian Moevs, editors

VOLUME 19

Liturgical Song and Practice in Dante’s Commedia

• Helena Phillips-Robins

VOLUME 18

Dante and Violence: Domestic, Civic, and Cosmic

• Brenda Deen Schildgen

VOLUME 17

A Boccaccian Renaissance: Essays on the Early Modern Impact of Giovanni Boccaccio and His Works

• edited by Martin Eisner and David Lummus

VOLUME 16

The Portrait of Beatrice: Dante, D.G. Rossetti, and the Imaginary Lady

• Fabio A. Camilletti

VOLUME 15

Boccaccio’s Corpus: Allegory, Ethics, and Vernacularity

• James C. Kriesel

VOLUME 14

Meditations on the Life of Christ:

The Short Italian Text

• Sarah McNamer

VOLUME 13

Interpreting Dante: Essays on the Traditions of Dante Commentary

• edited by Paola Nasti and Claudia Rossignoli

VOLUME 12

Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy

• Dennis Looney

VOLUME 11

Dante’s Commedia: Theology as Poetry

• edited by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne

VOLUME 10

Petrarch and Dante:

Anti-Dantism, Metaphysics, Tradition

• edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

VOLUME 9

The Ancient Flame: Dante and the Poets

• Winthrop Wetherbee

VOLUME 8

Accounting for Dante: Urban Readers and Writers in Late Medieval Italy

• Justin Steinberg

VOLUME 7

Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture

• Manuele Gragnolati

VOLUME 6

Understanding Dante

• John A. Scott

VOLUME 5

Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body

• Gary P. Cestaro

VOLUME 4

The Fiore and the Detto d’Amore: A Late 13th-Century Italian Translation of the Roman de la Rose, Attributable to Dante

• Translated, with introduction and notes, by Santa Casciani and Christopher Kleinhenz

VOLUME 3

The Design in the Wax: The Structure of the Divine Comedy and Its Meaning

• Marc Cogan

VOLUME 2

The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany

• edited by Zygmunt G. Barański and Patrick Boyde

VOLUME 1

Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies

• edited by Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.

LITURGICAL

SONG and

PRACTICE in

DANTE’S

COMMEDIA

HELENA PHILLIPS-ROBINS

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2021 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021931606

ISBN: 978-0-268-20068-8 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20067-1 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20070-1 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

ABOUT THE WILLIAM AND KATHERINE

DEVERS SERIES IN DANTE AND

MEDIEVAL ITALIAN LITERATURE

The William and Katherine Devers Program in Dante Studies at the University of Notre Dame supports rare book acquisitions in the university’s John A. Zahm Dante collections, funds an annual visiting professorship in Dante studies, and supports electronic and print publication of scholarly research in the field. In collaboration with the Medieval Institute at the university, the Devers program initiated a series dedicated to the publication of the most significant current scholarship in the field of Dante studies. In 2011 the scope of the series was expanded to encompass thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian literature.

In keeping with the spirit that inspired the creation of the Devers program, the series takes Dante and medieval Italian literature as focal points that draw together the many disciplines and lines of inquiry that constitute a cultural tradition without fixed boundaries. Accordingly, the series hopes to illuminate this cultural tradition within contemporary critical debates in the humanities by reflecting both the highest quality of scholarly achievement and the greatest diversity of critical perspectives.

The series publishes works from a wide variety of disciplinary viewpoints and in diverse scholarly genres, including critical studies, commentaries, editions, reception studies, translations, and conference proceedings of exceptional importance. The series enjoys the support of an international advisory board composed of distinguished scholars and is published regularly by the University of Notre Dame Press. The Dolphin and Anchor device that appears on publications of the Devers series was used by the great humanist, grammarian, editor, and typographer Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), in whose 1502 edition of Dante (second issue) and all subsequent editions it appeared. The device illustrates the ancient proverb Festina lente, Hurry up slowly.

Zygmunt G. Barański, Theodore J. Cachey, Jr.,

and Christian Moevs, editors

ADVISORY BOARD

Albert Russell Ascoli, Berkeley

Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia

Piero Boitani, Rome

Patrick Boyde, Cambridge

Alison Cornish, New York University

Claire Honess, Leeds

Christopher Kleinhenz, Wisconsin

Giuseppe Ledda, Bologna

Simone Marchesi, Princeton

Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale

Lino Pertile, Harvard

John A. Scott, Western Australia

For my parents, Jane and Ian,

and my brother, Alasdair

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations, Editions, and Translations

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE. Liturgy and Community

CHAPTER TWO. Liturgy and Participation in Christ

CHAPTER THREE. The Shared Voice of Liturgical Prayer

CHAPTER FOUR. Liturgy and Love

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1.1. Bistumsarchiv Osnabrück, Codex Gisle (MA 101), fol. 13v. Historiated initial, depicting a liturgical all time, for the chant Puer natus est nobis.

FIGURE 2.1. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Annunciation with Saints Ansanus and Massima(?) (1333).

FIGURE 3.1. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 36, fol. 189r (detail). Enthroned Virgin and Child.

FIGURE 3.2. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 36, fol. 186r (detail). Virgin and Child in a hortus conclusus.

FIGURE 3.3. British Library, Yates Thompson MS 36, fol. 190r (detail). The Virgin of the Assumption.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust for their funding of this research.

I owe a great deal to Heather Webb for her unfailing intellectual generosity and for the attention to detail with which she commented on drafts at every stage of the project. Robin Kirkpatrick’s influence has been formative. I thank him and Heather wholeheartedly. I am deeply grateful to the readers at the University of Notre Dame Press—one of whom was Vittorio Montemaggi, the other remained anonymous—for the generosity and care with which they commented on the manuscript and their many insightful suggestions. Zyg Barański offered particular support and encouragement at all points along the way. I am profoundly grateful to Simon Gilson and Matthew Treherne, who examined the doctoral thesis out of which this book arose, for their advice and support, which helped me better understand the nature of the research I was trying to undertake. Jane Phillips and Ian Robins offered insightful comments on the manuscript and much moral support. I particularly thank David Bowe, Theodore Cachey, Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, George Corbett, Giuseppe Ledda, Christian Moevs, Ryan Pepin, Katherine Powlesland, and Krešimir Vuković for illuminating, generous discussions about Dante. A conversation with Margot Fassler helped set me on the path for working on the liturgy of Santa Reparata, Florence’s former cathedral. I have been very fortunate in the academic homes in which I have worked on this project: Selwyn College, Gonville & Caius College, the Italian Section in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, all of the University of Cambridge, and the British School at Rome. I warmly thank Eli Bortz, copyeditor Scott Barker, and all the staff at UNDP for their assistance and advice. I am grateful to the staff in the British Library, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the Biblioteca Riccardiana, the Archivio dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore (these three all in Florence), and the Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati in Siena, for providing access to manuscripts; and to the staff in the British Library, the Bistumsarchiv Osnabrück, and the Uffizi for permission to reproduce the images in this book. And I wholeheartedly thank Sarah MacDonald, Christian Rutherford, and Silas Wollston for many years of choral singing.

Chapter 1 is derived in part from an article published in Italian Studies 71 (2016), copyright The Society for Italian Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00751634.2015.1132602. The first section of the chapter is a revised and expanded version of material published in the article; the second section is mostly new material. Part of chapter 3 is a considerably developed version of material originally published in Bibliotheca Dantesca 1 (2018), copyright ScholarlyCommons.

ABBREVIATIONS, EDITIONS,

AND TRANSLATIONS

DANTE’S WORKS

The following editions of Dante’s works have been used:

Commedia. Edited by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi. 3 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1991–94.

Il Convivio. Edited by Franca Brambilla Ageno. 2 vols. Florence: Le Lettere, 1995.

De vulgari eloquentia. Edited and translated by Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Epistola a Cangrande. Edited by Enzo Cecchini. Florence: Giunti, 1995.

Translations of Dante’s works are taken from the following:

The Divine Comedy. Edited and translated by Robin Kirkpatrick. 3 vols. London: Penguin, 2006–2007.

Dante’s Il Convivio (The Banquet). Translated by Richard H. Lansing. New York: Garland, 1990.

Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante. Emended text, with introduction, translation, notes, et alia by Paget Toynbee. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966.

BIBLE

Biblia Sacra Vulgata, Clementine Version, and translations from The Holy Bible, Douay/Rheims Version. http:www.drbo.org.

COMMENTARIES ON THE COMMEDIA

The following commentaries on the Commedia are cited from the Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dartmouth.edu/:

L’Ottimo Commento (1333)

Benvenuto da Imola (1375–80)

Francesco da Buti (1385–95)

John S. Carroll (1904–11)

Attilio Momigliano (1946–51)

Natalino Sapegno (1955–57)

Charles S. Singleton (1970–75)

Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio (1979)

Robert Hollander (2000–2007)

Nicola Fosca (2003–15)

The following commentaries are cited from the printed editions below:

Commedia. Edited by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi. 3 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1991–94.

La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Edited by Giorgio Petrocchi. 2nd ed. 4 vols. Florence: Le Lettere, 1994.

The Divine Comedy. Edited and translated by Robert M. Durling. Introduction and notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011.

Dantis Alagherii Comedia. Edited by Federico Sanguineti. Florence: Galluzzo, 2001.

The Divine Comedy. Edited and translated by Robin Kirkpatrick. 3 vols. London: Penguin, 2006–2007.

When not otherwise noted, translations are my own.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

As Dante advances round the terrace of the avaricious, the mountain suddenly shakes, and all the inhabitants of purgatory shout out, with a cry so powerful Dante is struck motionless with fear and wonder, Gloria in excelsis Deo:

Poi cominciò da tutte parti un grido

tal, che ’l maestro inverso me si feo,

dicendo: Non dubbiar, mentr’ io ti guido.

"Glorïa in excelsis tutti Deo"

dicean, per quel ch’io da’ vicin compresi,

onde intender lo grido si poteo.

No’ istavamo immobili e sospesi

come i pastor che prima udir quel canto,

fin che ’l tremar cessò ed el compiési.

(Purg. 20.133–41)

———

On every side there then began this cry / (my teacher turned around to me to say, / While I’m your guide, you need not be afraid): / "Gloria in excelsis Deo!" and all / were speaking out these words, so I could tell / the meaning of the cry from those close to. / We stood unmoving, caught there in suspense— / as were the shepherds who first heard this song— / until the tremor ceased and all was done.

At this point in the narrative it is a mystery as to why the souls perform a liturgical offering of praise, but the words themselves would have been deeply familiar to a medieval reader. So familiar, in fact, that it is likely that the reader would call to mind the second half of the phrase: et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. A medieval Christian would have known this song, not because she would have read it in a book, but because she would have heard it performed—and in all probability would have prayed, aloud or silently, some or all of its words—during the liturgy of the Mass. An anonymous devotional guide to the Mass preserved in a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century pocket-size miscellany, for example, advises that after the priest has sung the opening words of the Gloria—Gloria in excelsis Deo—the laity should bow deeply and sing the rest of the chant, bowing twice more at specified moments.¹ The performance of the Gloria in Purgatorio 20—which celebrates, we later learn, Statius’s liberation from purgatory—shapes relationships between the purgatorial souls, between the souls and others who perform the Gloria, in history and in eternity, and between the souls and the God they glorify. Dante refashions a lived experience that was available to his medieval readers, and places that experience at the center of a network of unfolding relationships, both human and divine.

In this book, I explore the manifold ways in which the relationship between humanity and divinity is shaped through the performance of liturgy in the Commedia. The act of engaging in liturgical song, and in other forms of liturgical prayer, serves to transform and sustain relationships between humans, and between humans and the source and ground of their being, that ultimate reality Dante calls God. I focus on liturgy as it relates to those human beings who have yet to reach beatitude: the penitent souls in Purgatorio, Dante, and the readers of the poem.

Liturgy is the public worship of the Church.² Here I define liturgy as the public—that is, shared, communal—worship of the Church in any or all of its three states, Militant on earth, Suffering in purgatory, and Triumphant in heaven. I focus on liturgical singing, because the majority of the liturgical performances Dante depicts involve song, but I also pay close attention to other interrelated modes of verbal and nonverbal prayer.

In Paradiso 10, Dante describes the daily offering of liturgy as a love song:

Indi, come orologio che ne chiami

ne l’ora che la sposa di Dio surge

a mattinar lo sposo perché l’ami,

che l’una parte e l’altra tira e urge,

tin tin sonando con sì dolce nota,

che ’l ben disposto spirto d’amor turge;

così vid’ ïo la gloriosa rota

muoversi e render voce a voce in tempra

e in dolcezza ch’esser non pò nota

se non colà dove gioir s’insempra.

(Par. 10.139–48)

———

And now, like clocks that call us at the hour / in which the Bride of God will leave her bed / to win the Bridegroom’s love with morning song, / where, working, one part drives, the other draws— / its ‘ting-ting’ sounding with so sweet a note / that now the spirit, well and ready, swells— / so in its glory I beheld that wheel / go moving round and answer, voice to voice, / tuned to a sweetness that cannot be known, / except up there where joy in-evers all.

The sposa di Dio, who could be both the Church and the individual soul, rises for the first service of the day.³ Matins, and by extension the whole of the liturgy, is presented as an outpouring of song that both expresses love and desire for union with Christ and asks for and expects a response. The Bride sings to the Bridegroom, perché l’ami; she seeks an answering outpouring of love.

That liturgy enables the unfolding of a two-way relationship, involving the activity of people and of God, is borne out by the associations of one of Dante’s key words, surge. The imagery and lexicon of this passage are indebted to the Song of Songs; among other resonances, Dante’s surge echoes the canticle’s Surge, propera, amica mea, columba mea, formosa mea, et veni (Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come) (2:10).⁴ The Bridegroom calls the Bride to rise up—surge!—and come to him, and then, three verses later, he calls her again: Surge, amica mea, speciosa mea, et veni (Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come) (2:13). In the following chapters the Bride declares that she will rise up to go and seek the one whom she loves—Surgam, et circuibo civitatem: per vicos et plateas quaeram quem diligit anima mea (I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth) (3:2)—and then relates how she rose up to open herself to her beloved—Surrexi ut aperirem dilecto meo; manus meae stillaverunt myrrham, et digiti mei pleni myrrha probatissima (I arose up to open to my beloved: my hands dripped with myrrh, and my fingers were full of the choicest myrrh) (5:5). The verb surgere expresses the desire of both Bride and Bridegroom, used first by Christ to call to his Bride and then by the Bride to declare her search for, and longed-after union with, him.⁵ In Paradiso 10, the Italian third-person present tense surge, describing the Bride who rises to meet her Bridegroom, recalls the Latin imperative surge!, with which the Bridegroom calls his Bride in the Song of Songs. In the Paradiso passage, Christ’s calling of the Bride and the Bride’s response to Christ are overlaid one on the other, suggesting that the rising of the Bride to greet God is itself a response to the call and desire of God. The liturgy—mattinar—love song is an expression and enactment of love for God, a seeking after God’s love, and a response to God’s love. Liturgy, as it is presented here, is about as far from empty ritualism as it is possible to imagine. Liturgy is depicted as, ideally, an encounter with God, an encounter in and through which humans can enter into closer union with him. It is such a significant encounter that, in Dante’s simile, the very summons to worship makes the spirit swell with love.⁶ In evoking liturgy as an encounter with God, Dante goes to the heart of what liturgy was, in the medieval West, understood to do.

During the Middle Ages, the Latin liturgy was understood to be an indispensable means of bringing humans into relationship with God. The sights, smells, actions, gestures, words, and music of the liturgy worked in manifold ways to enable worshippers to encounter their Creator. Simply put, God became present to and met his people in the liturgy. The liturgy celebrated by the Church Militant on earth was also understood as providing a foretaste of the worship offered by the Church Triumphant in heaven. Liturgy, furthermore, gave people concepts for making sense of their existence in this world and the next. Liturgy, for example, gave worshippers ways of understanding the past and ways of conceiving their own place in history.⁷ Liturgy offered a framework within which to understand and experience the passage of time, and it set finite temporalities against the backdrop of an assumed eternity.⁸ Liturgy mediated understanding and experience of scripture: it was primarily through liturgy that people encountered the Bible, and even scholars who studied the Bible as a written text would regularly hear its words—juxtaposed and combined with all the other elements of liturgy—in church services.⁹ On both a practical and a spiritual level, liturgy shaped the rhythms of daily life. The days, the weeks, and the seasons, and the course of each person’s life, were measured out in and by the cycles of liturgy. The liturgy was an intimately familiar, deeply ingrained set of lived, shared practices through which participants might encounter God. Its significance can hardly be overstated.¹⁰

And yet scholars have only recently begun to address Dante’s use of liturgy.¹¹ In an article published in the mid-1980s, Louis La Favia showed that in ante-purgatory the souls’ songs are sung at the same times of day as they would have been in the liturgical cycle on earth.¹² In 1990, Erminia Ardissino surveyed the liturgical songs sung in Purgatorio, foregrounding the penitential character of the songs and the communal bonds the souls build through singing them.¹³ Ardissino’s Tempo liturgico e tempo storico nella Commedia di Dante (2009) examines the relationships between liturgy and politics, particularly with regard to the theme of justice.¹⁴ In 1993, Andrew McCracken demonstrated how a series of allusions to the office of Compline structures the episode of the Valley of the Princes (Purgatorio 7–8).¹⁵ With an essay published in 1995, John Barnes reveals that Dante draws extensively on the liturgy for the language, themes, and structure of the Commedia. Barnes also provides an appendix listing many of the major liturgical references in the poem.¹⁶ Ronald Martinez, building on and moving beyond Barnes’s work, has brought to light the great range and richness of liturgical references, allusions, and echoes in Dante’s oeuvre. Martinez shows how richly and variously the liturgy—particularly the language and texts of liturgy—informs Dante’s language, imagery, and themes.¹⁷ Martinez has also demonstrated that in various cantos of Purgatorio (2, 23–24, and 29), Dante juxtaposes liturgical texts with vernacular lyric texts as a means of reflecting on lyric poetry and practices.¹⁸ It is clear from Martinez’s research that Dante knew the liturgy intimately and extensively. Martinez focuses on the liturgical echoes and allusions that pervade Dante’s language, but he is less concerned with the actual liturgical performances depicted in the Commedia. Martinez tends to approach the liturgy as a vast and complex corpus of material on which Dante draws for the language and imagery of his poem. And although this offers an important perspective, it does not, I would suggest, get to the heart of what liturgy is and does. Liturgy is a vast and diverse body of material, but that material exists in order to become lived experience, and, ideally, lived experience of encounter with God. If we treat liturgy primarily as a source and intertext for the lexicon and imagery of the Commedia, but pay less attention to the ways in which liturgy unfolds as lived, embodied practice, then we are missing the fundamental point of liturgy.

Matthew Treherne argues that in the Commedia liturgical performances are nothing less than a way of shaping personhood. Specifically, Treherne has shown that in Purgatorio liturgical performance of penance works to direct souls away from excessive attachment to secondary goods—an attachment that distorts the souls’ relationship with God—and toward a recognition that God, the Creator and the ultimate good, is the source on which their very being depends. In Paradiso, liturgical performance of praise is both an acknowledgment and a living out of this relationship, in that offering glory to God means offering back something that is already his. In praising God, the souls give back what they receive from God, and so recognize and participate in him as the source and ground of their being.¹⁹ Treherne has also demonstrated how liturgical performances in Purgatorio offer ways of experiencing time that allow the souls to experience their own journeys toward God within the context of universal salvation history.²⁰ Treherne’s work is particularly significant because it shows that in the Commedia liturgy is far more than a rich source of language and imagery. Rather, Treherne shows that, for Dante, liturgy is a constitutive part of the unfolding of personhood, and that liturgy is such because it transforms and sustains the nexus between humans and God.²¹

I move in two new directions. First, I investigate in detail the ways in which the songs and prayers Dante cites were understood, known, and lived in the liturgies of the late medieval Church. This contextualized reading gives insights into how Dante and his contemporary readers may have experienced these songs in their daily lives, and these findings help us interpret the ways in which Dante conceives liturgy and the manifold relationships that unfold in and through liturgical performance. In order to do this I draw on thirteenth-century Latin liturgical sources—principally ordinal books and liturgical treatises—that are as yet untapped (in the case of ordinal books) or little used (in the case of liturgical treatises) in Dante studies. I discuss these sources in more depth later in this introduction.

Second, and partly arising from this focus on liturgy as lived experience, I investigate the types of engagement that Dante’s depictions of liturgical performance invite from the reader. Based on historically attentive analysis of the ways Dante refashions specific liturgical practices, and on analysis of the experiential and communal nature of liturgy—as conceived in the Commedia and as practiced in the cultural contexts in which Dante lived—I argue that Dante invites readers to themselves perform the poem’s liturgical songs and, by performing these songs, to enter into relationship with the divine. Dante calls not only for the reader’s interpretative response to the Commedia, but also for her performative and spiritual activity.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE READER

Dante tells us, explicitly and repeatedly, that one of his aims in writing the Commedia was to help his readers journey toward what he variously calls God, truth, and love. He writes in pro del mondo che mal vive (to aid the world that lives all wrong) (Purg. 32.103), making manifest what he has seen and heard (Purg. 33.52–57; Par. 27.64–66) so that his poem might give vital nodrimento to those on earth whose blinding obsession with self and earthly goods so distorts their relationships with others and with God that they risk losing their sempiternal life in heaven (Par. 17.124–42). Cacciaguida famously exhorts Dante:

"Ma nondimen, rimossa ogne menzogna,

tutta tua visïon fa manifesta;

e lascia pur grattar dov’ è la rogna.

Ché se la voce tua sarà molesta

nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento

lascerà poi, quando sarà digesta."

(Par. 17.127–32)

———

But none the less, all lies put clean aside, / make plain what in your vision you have seen, / and let them scratch wherever they may itch. / For if at first your voice tastes odious, / still it will offer, as digestion works, / life-giving nutriment to those who eat.

Vital—a word that has particular prominence as it is a hapax in the Commedia—carries the full meaning of that which sustains life, lifeimparting.²² In Paradiso 25, Dante makes an equally strong claim about the prophetic, life-giving mission of the Commedia, this time placing the words in the mouth of James:

"Poi che per grazia vuol che tu t’affronti

lo nostro Imperadore, anzi la morte,

ne l’aula più secreta co’ suoi conti,

sì che, veduto il ver di questa corte,

la spene, che là giù bene innamora,

in te e in altrui di ciò conforte,

dì quel ch’ell’ è."

(Par. 25.40–46)

———

Because our Emperor in grace desires / that you, before your death, should come to greet / his nobles in these secret audience rooms— / so that, once truth is seen in this high court, / the hope that stirs you in good love down there / may gather strength in you and others, too— / say what hope is.

Dante seeks to strengthen the hope of his readers, nourishing in them that virtue which, from a medieval Christian perspective, is indispensable for assimilating oneself to God in this world and so for reaching perfect union with him in the next.²³ The mission Dante envisages for the Commedia is immense. This is not merely a question of urging readers toward good behavior, but of prompting radical transformation, of assisting readers toward union with God, which, in Dante’s worldview, is the goal toward which one should move on earth and the state one will reach in heaven.²⁴

Christian Moevs, in his work on Dante’s understanding of reality and truth, has shown how Dante’s claim that the Commedia is true is a claim that the Commedia can lead the reader to know herself as one with the love that moves creation. Moevs writes that for Dante, a narrative is true or real that embodies, mediates, or unveils the ultimate subject or ground of experience: this can only mean that through such a narrative, the divine, reflected in or as the intelligence of the reader, recognizes itself and awakens to itself.²⁵ Dante’s claim that the Commedia is true is not, Moevs demonstrates, a claim that the poem is an objective report of events and things, but rather a claim that the poem embodies and reveals, albeit partially, the ultimate reality, which Dante calls God. Whether the Commedia is true in this sense, whether it succeeds in mediating the divine, depends on the individual reader: "Whether the Comedy is what it would have us accept it to be is in practice answered by each reader with yes or no; undecidedness, intellectual detachment, scholarly skepticism, scientific objectivity, or an aesthetic response that is not simultaneously ethical is of course no."²⁶ Dante’s claim about the nature of the Commedia is at one with his aim to bring salvation to his readers.²⁷

One person in the poem whose life is changed by the act of reading is, of course, Statius. Simone Marchesi, in his analysis of Statius as reader of Virgil in Purgatorio 21–22, argues that Dante proposes a hermeneutic model for the Commedia in which the ultimate goal of reading is not that of recovering the author’s intentions, but rather that of growing in love for God. Marchesi links this mode of understanding the reader’s activity to Augustine’s hermeneutics of scripture, specifically Augustine’s regula caritatis, the hermeneutic principle according to which the essential message (and the final criterion for the interpretation) of God’s Word is the construction in the reader of the double love for God and neighbour.²⁸

Investigating the ways in which Dante attempts to bring about the spiritual transformation of his readers—the ways in which he invites and assists readers to enter more deeply into a reality, God, which lies beyond the world and is the ground of the world’s existence—is crucial for understanding the premise and the very purpose of the Commedia as Dante presents them. These are questions that underpin so many aspects of the Commedia that no single study could offer a comprehensive exploration. Multiple critical approaches and perspectives are needed. These are also questions that modern Dante scholarship has not tended, until recently, to take up.²⁹

Vittorio Montemaggi, in his work on the dynamics of human encounter, explores how, for Dante, properly to journey toward God is properly to encounter other human beings, and vice versa. Love and justice, for Dante, are the primary forms in which divinity manifests itself in human interaction, and it is in the unfolding of relationships marked by love and justice—which is to say, marked by the act of paying kind, self-giving attention to the particularity of another person—that humans can become most truly themselves, consciously flourishing as expressions of divinity. Montemaggi argues that Dante invites us to consider the act of reading the Commedia as a form of human encounter with its author. If we take seriously Dante’s claim that he wrote the Commedia to help guide us toward deeper participation in God, and if we consider that mission as one motivated by love and concern for others—mixed, inevitably, and as Dante is well aware, with pride, and marked by his own shortcomings—then the act of reading the Commedia can be an encounter that is marked on Dante’s side, and potentially on ours, by kindness expressed through the offering of help, and by recognition of one’s own failures and need for aid. As such, reading the Commedia can itself be an activity that can help us realize divinity in human encounter.³⁰

Heather Webb, in her study of personhood in the Commedia, argues that Dante not only depicts a vision of what it means to be fully and truly human, but that he also calls readers to work toward recovering their full personhood. For Dante, being human is ultimately not about properness or individuality, but about a purely relational existence. Webb argues that Dante calls us to recognize the personhood of the characters depicted in the poem and in doing so to sustain both their personhood and ours. Webb shows how Dante’s portrayals of human gestures, postures, and gazes invite active responses from the reader, specifically, how they invite the reader to practice particular modes of attention and recognition.³¹

George Corbett, through a comparative analysis of medieval preaching practices and cantos 10–12 of Purgatorio, argues that Dante gives readers the tools to help them to turn away from the vice of pride and to deepen the virtue of humility. Dante models and invites the reader to undertake a practice of prayerful meditation in which one reflects on one’s own life in relation to examples of humility, penitence, and pride.³² Claire Honess, examining the rhetoric of the Commedia, has shown how Dante uses features characteristic of medieval satire to condemn vice and praise virtue, thereby goading his addressees into moral improvement.³³ In her work on the narratological mechanisms of the Commedia, Katherine Powlesland—who frames questions relating to Dante’s attempts to change his readers, not in theological terms but as an exploration of ways in which the reader may be invited to a first-person participation in the narrative—argues that Dante offers the reader a series of opportunities to exercise and refine her capacities for various forms of imaginative and cognitive activity.³⁴ As emerges from the research outlined in this and the previous two paragraphs, Dante’s invitations to the reader to respond in active ways to the Commedia—whether those responses are cognitive, devotional, affective, intellectual, ethical, or, in many cases, a mixture of these—go far beyond those moments when he explicitly addresses the reader.³⁵ Rather, Dante invites our active responses at every point in the poem. Questions concerning the types of engagement Dante invites from readers also need to be asked in relation to Dante’s other works. Ambrogio Camozzi Pistoja, by comparing the epistemology of the Convivio to medieval exegesis of the epistemology of Jesus’s parables, argues that in the Convivio Dante seeks to reform the moral disposition of a certain type of reader, the assettatori de’ vizii (those addicted to vice) (Conv. 1.1.12). The Convivio presents itself as incomprehensible to such people precisely in order to prompt their moral conversion, after which they will have the correct disposition to read and understand the text.³⁶

Here I offer a new approach—at once historically and theologically informed—through