Abstract
Dante’s Agents proposes that any adequate reading of the Purgatorio must take serious account of idea, commonplace in the European Middle Ages but rarely on critical radars now, of “divine-human cooperation”: the idea that God and a human being can perform a common task in such an intimate fashion that it is impossible to say, even after the fact, who has done what. Cooperation on that order, according to some of the medieval thinkers who discussed it, can result not only in a unified work, but in a unification of the workers — a trajectory that is very much applicable to the Divine Comedy, given the Purgatorio’s extensive philosophical investigation of the workings of human will and the Paradiso’s protracted narrative of the increasing divinization (or “transhumanizing”) of the human.
The genre of the study is part commentary, part interpretive essay. It steps through key passages in the poem where cooperation between human and superhuman forces is on display, including the protagonists’ opening interview with Cato; their instruction by the poet Sordello on the peculiar fact that Mt. Purgatory can only be ascended while the sun is up; their overnight stay with angelically protected noblemen in a mountainside valley; and, of course, Virgil’s discourses on love and freedom in canto 18, which form a centerpiece of the study as of the poem. In all these places (and many more, including key scenes in cantos 21, 24, 27, and 33), close attention to Dante’s Italian is interwoven with extended readings of some of the thinkers whose influence on him in such matters seems most evident, including not only high-medieval scholastics (Aquinas, Bonaventure, Alexander of Hales, Peter Lombard) and monastics (preeminently Bernard of Clairvaux) but also earlier sources reaching back to antiquity (Abelard, Augustine, Boethius, Aristotle). Against those backgrounds, every one of the selected scenes takes on consequential new meanings, while a number of longstanding critical puzzles (e.g. the frequent pairing of Mary and Lucia, the sheer number of serious mistakes made by Virgil) are illumined in new light, if not solved. Still more, a new way emerges of seeing the entire overarching narrative of the Commedia’s last two canticles, a way that clarifies, and dwells in the tension between, Dante’s deep love for the “pagan” philosophy in which Virgil instructs him and his belief in its apparently insuperable limits.
A sequel to the author’s monograph God’s Patients, which takes up similar themes in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante’s Agents should be of interest to anyone studying the relations between philosophy and Christian theology in medieval Europe; to those inspired, more particularly, by the question of Christianity’s relation to the so-called “righteous pagans”; to anyone pursuing what is now called “action theory” and theological engagements with it (on, for example, questions about the possibility or impossibility of a self-grounded human agency); and, finally, to anyone who would simply like to think deeply about the intellectual gifts Dante’s poetry has to offer and about the preceding traditions that helped him create those gifts. The text comprises a brief introduction, four substantial chapters on the Purgatorio, and a chapter-length epilogue that sketches how the same themes reappear and develop across the whole course of the Paradiso. Those interested in reading the study while it is under electronic embargo are invited to contact the author (email jsb4p at this university's domain) to discuss possibilities.
