Reading Dante's Commedia as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter

ISBN-13: 9780190495466 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 328 str.

Vittorio Montemaggi

Opis

Dante's Commedia compels readers to confront the mystery of their existence, to seek understanding of their relationship to the living conscious reality from which all possible experience arises. By pursuing these lines of inquiry, says Vittorio Montemaggi, readers can reach an ultimate reality that Dante calls love.

Montemaggi offers a detailed theological reading of the Commedia, examining the theme of human interaction, both as it is represented in the poem-the narrator Dante's interaction with other characters-and by the relationship between author and reader. In doing so, he locates a Dante we may not be used to imagining, a man aware both of the spiritual power of his work, and of his profound, essential vulnerability and moral failing. Montemaggi shows that, for this Dante, truth emerges only through human limitation and failure, and not in spite of it.

Applying this interpretive framework to a reflection on the methodology of scholarship itself, Montemaggi offers a vision of what the academy could be-not individual scholars in competition with others, but a community that seeks to foster the understanding that can arise through interaction, vulnerability, and love. His vision constitutes a benign challenge to some of the ethos and practices of the modern academy, while simultaneously reflecting on the dynamics of one of the most inspiring and influential texts ever written about the relationship between humanity and divinity.

Recenzje

As curious, quirky, and all-embracing as the Commedia itself, Montemaggi's kaleidoscopic book fuses two very distinct modes of writing about Dante that until now have always remained separate: a reader's deeply personal, spiritual engagement with the poem on one hand, and a professional Dante scholar's rigorous intellectual analysis on the other. Presenting Dante not simply as a poet who creates art that happens to involve theology, but as a truly original theologian whose poetic art is his theology, Montemaggi ably articulates the startling inventiveness of Dante's bold theological vision: for the Commedia insists that we are all called to divinization, to union with the living God, whom Dante invites us to discover within ourselves and, more importantly, in our loving relationships with each other.

O autorze

Vittorio Montemaggi is Assistant Professor of Religion and Literature in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Notre Dame, where he is also Concurrent Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology. Following degrees in Theology and in European Literature, his work has centered on the relationship between language, truth, and love.