Dante and Orpheus in the Age of Flatness

Guest Edition by Jason Baxter

Dante is the poet who just won’t die.

Especially among those dedicated to cultivating the Catholic Imagination. The Florentine poet haunts modernity, showing up in so many unexpected places: not just among the English Romantics, but also among the European Avant-garde (Eliot, Rodin, Dali); and in the songs of enslaved Americans, he was the poet of Exodus, the poet of freedom, the poet of a promised liberation. Evidently, Dante’s poem possesses some elusive power that feels modern.

In a similar way, Dante also haunts the modern university. A couple of years ago, Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life hosted Dante, Mercy, and the Human Person, whose proceedings are now in print for those who were unable to attend. And last September, to honor the 700th Anniversary of Dante’s death, another CIC sponsor, Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, at Loyola, Chicago, ran an online seminar, “Why Dante Matters Today,” which featured some of the speakers who will be present in Dallas this September for our panel dedicated to Dante. Just last February, Randy Boyagoda was at the University of Dallas to discuss his Dante-inspired novel, Dante’s Indiana. And Glenn Arbery tells me that his Wiseblood-published trilogy also will recapitulate the pilgrim’s journey from disordered chaos to heavenly polyphony. Meanwhile, another sponsor, Well-Read Moms, not only has Dante on their members’ reading list, but has also launched a chapter of moms in Italia! And those in the Chicago area might want to make time in November to go to the Athenaeum, which is putting on a whole immersive show, in their newly remodeled and redesigned center for the arts: Dante 360.

However, back in DFW, the Catholic Imagination Conference’s Dante Panel will feature Paul Contino of Pepperdine, expert on Dostoevsky and Eastern Classics; along with local host Anthony Nussmeier, who specializes on Dante and the Italian lyrical tradition; as well as Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, poet and Flannery O’Connor scholar from Fordham; and me, author of an introductory text on the Comedy, in use in college classrooms, as well as The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, which features a chapter on Lewis’s debt to the Italian master. Dante will also show up on the translation panel at CIC, where I will be talking about the “philosophy of translation” driving my new translation. But I am not alone in wanting to join, in Jessica Hooten Wilson’s memorable words, “the great tribe of presumptuous asses courageous enough to go where many have gone before.” Jessica has recently contemplated Mary Jo Bang’s translation. And then there is DFW local and UD Alum, Joe Carlson, has just published his blank verse translation of Inferno, newly available. 

Best of all: I do not think any of this would have surprised the master. He did not lack self-confidence. In fact, just five years after his poem was “published,” the Carmelite commentator, Guido da Pisa, wrote a learned Latin commentary, in which he said that Dante had “brought poetry back into the light, back from the shadows of death.” And by doing this, he had become a new Boethius: “By doing this he imitated Boethius, who had resuscitated philosophy, which had been dead in his day.” Dante then was an Orpheus. But successful. Modern scholars are simply returning the favor. To paraphrase Guido da Pisa: “mortuum Dantem de tenebris reduximus ad lucem.”

But why does Dante still feel so modern? Why does he still inspire conferences, panels, novels, and even the world’s largest reading group?

I think it must be, at least, in part, because the encyclopedic, multisensory, layered nature of the Florentine master’s poem. Dante was not simply a translator of Thomism into verse--as it used to be put in a polemical age--but was rather a maker of a summa of his own. He read Aquinas and Aristotle, but he also read--seemingly, read without the ability to forget--Augustine, Boethius, Dionysius the Areopagite, Bernard of Clairvaux (maybe even other Cistercians: Isaac of Stella?), the Victorines (Richard of St. Victor, Hugh of St. Victor, and Thomas Gallus), the Platonic mystical tradition, maybe the so-called Chartrians, and--perhaps as influential as any other source--the Franciscan spiritual tradition, not to mention the classical tradition or the contemporary romance and lyric traditions. We need to think of Dante’s thought like one of those urban bird nests: made up of shoestrings, plastic six-pack containers, straw, twigs, and ribbon: it is this interweaving of ideas that might be what Dante even means by “poetry.” And this is also reflected on the very linguistic level. What scholars call polisemia dantesca--an appreciation for the polysemous nature of Dante’s text-- can be applied to the linguistic level of the poem: not just the ideas within it but also the very words and phrases themselves. The fabric of Dante’s language is an extraordinary texture made up, on the lexical level, of Gallicisms, Provencalisms, dialect words from across Italy, Latinisms, even if the base language was medieval Tuscan. And on the syntactical level, Dante’s poem is made up of different rhythms, different speeds, so that sometimes it feels like its floating--resisting time--and sometimes it moves along at a swift marching pace.

Perhaps our pre-modern writer’s polisemia feels so relevant in our age, an age Deborah Lupton has described as the era of the “the datafication of the self,” because we yearn for a sense of the polyphonic and fugal complexity of human experience in our age of flatness.

In any case, Dante won’t die.

James Matthew Wilson put it this way to me: “every student in the MFA program will read Dante’s Divine Comedy during their time with us. We want them to cultivate a generation of writers steeped in the long and profound Catholic literary tradition. For the last 700 years and the 700 years to come, Dante will remain at the center of it. The examples of Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, and others show that Dante remains a great source of inspiration for anyone who wants to write about the experience of the divine.”

Jason M. Baxter is a college professor, speaker, and author of five books, including A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Comedy and The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis. He currently teaches great books at Notre Dame and is a curricular consultant for St. Thomas More Academy in South Bend, IN.