Angelus News | August 27, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 17

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lines. To mark the “Year of Dante” in
2021, Arnone, a retired Catholic high
school principal from Turin, Italy, is
leading a YouTube lecture series titled
“Walking with Dante” to accompany
21st-century readers of “The Divine
Comedy.”
Ahead of the 700th anniversary of
Dante’s death on September 14, 2021,
Angelus spoke to Arnone, who credits
Dante with helping him “re-understand”
the meaning of his own life,
about how the poet’s reflections on
freedom, happiness, and true love can
help guide readers through their own
journey “out of the woods.”
How should we read Dante’s “The
Divine Comedy” in 2021? As a “real”
mystical experience or just a piece of
fiction?
In a letter to his leading patron,
Cangrande della Scala, Dante called
his work “polysemous,” or “of many
senses.” The first sense is that which
comes from the letter, the “literal”; the
second is that which is signified by the
letter, the “allegorical.”
He adds: “The subject of the whole
work, taken only from a literal standpoint,
is simply the status of the soul
after death. … If the work is taken allegorically,
however, the subject is man,
either gaining or losing merit through
his freedom of will.”
He also explains the purpose of his
poem: “To remove those living in this
life from the state of misery and to lead
them to the state of happiness.”
A mystical experience? We cannot
rule it out, but this does not explain the
meaning and the goal of Dante’s poem.
The subject of Dante’s work is man,
every human being lost in the woods
of life. And we should understand
Dante’s fictional journey as the endless
adventure that is our own journey
through life, marked by an attempt
to fulfill that desire for happiness that
defines us as human beings.
In order to write “The Divine Comedy,”
Dante left several other literary
projects unfinished. Why is that?
Why did Dante feel such urgency to
write “The Divine Comedy”?
In order to write “The Divine Comedy,”
Dante abandoned a major literary
project that he had dedicated a lot of
work to, the “Convivio” (the “Banquet”).
Through the metaphor of the
“banquet of knowledge” this work,
a collection of poems with prose
commentaries, was meant to supply
people with a philosophical “food” of
sorts, in an effort to guide its readers
to true happiness and true fulfillment.
Dante abandoned this project when he
realized that philosophical knowledge
is not sufficient.
Vincenzo “Enzo” Arnone. | SUBMITTED PHOTO
At the age of 9, Dante fell in love
with Beatrice, a woman he loved until
her premature death. After Beatrice’s
death, he sought consolation in rational
knowledge, in philosophy, but soon
he realized that knowledge is not able
to provide an answer commensurate
with the depth and vastness of his
own desire for beauty and happiness,
a desire that had been sparked by his
encounter with Beatrice. When Dante
fell in love with Beatrice he experienced
a glimpse, a foretaste of infinite
happiness.
The famous critic Charles Singleton
described “The Divine Comedy” as
a “return to Beatrice.” For Dante, the
whole poem is an attempt to recover
that moment, the encounter that
sparked in him the intuition of the divine
and gifted him with a completely
new way of writing love poetry.
Certainly there are other factors that
contributed to his decision to write
a poem to which, in Dante’s words,
“both earth and heaven contributed”:
Dante’s political setbacks, the failure of
his earthly aspirations, as well as the jubilee
of the year 1300, the first jubilee
in the Church’s history. This event was
supposed to bring Christianity back to
authentic faith, bringing about a renewal
that the Holy Spirit had already
set in motion through the preaching of
St. Dominic and St. Francis.
Dante wrote in a time and place
where society was Christian. That is
not the case today, and many Christians
feel that the answer to a world
that has abandoned Christianity is
for Christians to abandon the world.
Would Dante agree?
True, medieval society was Christian,
yet the Christian world of Dante’s time
was full of tensions and contradictions.
The Church was torn within itself and
constantly at war with political powers.
Yet, the Middle Ages knew the “art of
coming back,” or, we should say, “the
art of conversion.”
Perhaps the most intriguing figure
in Dante’s “Comedy” in this respect
is the character of Ulysses. Ulysses
returns from the Trojan War after years
of wandering. At the end of his life, he
sets out on a journey in which he crosses
the limits of the known world, the
pillars of Hercules, in a vain attempt to
achieve supreme knowledge, only to be
overcome by a storm.
In a sense, Dante is a Christian Ulysses
who succeeds where the classical
character failed. First, he manages
to go back home, the location that
humanity was destined for in the first
place: heaven, our true home. Then,
like a new Ulysses, he crosses the
uttermost limits of human experience
— the true “pillars of Hercules,” death.
He does so in order to recover life’s
meaning, in order to rescue us from
our constant wandering without hope
of fulfilment.
But this is only possible if we are
helped to take seriously our desire in
its totality. Our desire is ultimately
oriented toward the most desirable of
all: the divine, the ultimate answer to
human longing.
Dante describes this with an example:
August 27, 2021 • ANGELUS • 15