In this paper I would like to discuss the pleasure and success I have had in teaching all three books of Dante's Comedy to undergraduates (primarily first-year students) for the last six years. I have been fortunate in that all of my classes have been small (fifteen student) seminars that have fostered the honest and open exploration of these texts.(1) Even so, many would probably expect that teaching Dante to modern students would be a disaster, or at least a challenge, as he seems to be one of the most historically conditioned and limited authors. Dante populates his greatest work with characters and themes taken from his medieval world, including its history, politics, religion, astrology, science, and philosophy, as well as from the Bible and classical mythology. Our students, and even those of their teachers who are not medieval scholars (myself included), possess only a rudimentary knowledge of the classical and Biblical material, and nothing of the medieval, so how can they possibly understand such a work, and how can we pretend to teach it effectively? It has been my experience, however, that Dante provides an excellent occasion for discussions of human and divine nature: the beauty, humor, and playfulness of his poetry, together with the fact that students perceive him to be a neutral, non-canonical text, help students to think in ways and consider questions they might never have attempted otherwise. I would offer the following as the first piece of anecdotal evidence in support of this. It is the source of my greatest professional pride that in five semesters of teaching at Villanova University, my students have been honored with Core Humanities Writing Awards five times,(2) and two of these have been for essays written on Dante, one by a student majoring in Chemical Engineering,(3) one by a Commerce and Finance major.(4) In order to try to explain the power I see Dante exercising over 21st century undergraduates, I will consider three passages, one from each of the three realms of the Comedy, to illustrate the ways in which Dante has worked in my seminars.
In the Inferno, one of the questions with which my students struggle is to consider what is the purpose of punishing the damned: is it for revenge, retribution, rehabilitation, or something else? This leads the students to consider more deeply the nature of sin and free will. This question usually comes up in several different formulations, and with different answers, as the problem of the virtuous pagans in Limbo is quite different from that of the sinful in the lower circles, but its most striking image would seem to be in Canto XXXIII, where Dante meets Count Ugolino, who describes the death of himself and his children at the hands of Archbishop Ruggieri, with whom he is encased in the lake of ice. As soon as he is done telling his story, he falls again to gnawing on his enemy: "glaring down in rage, [he] attacked again the wretched skull with his teeth sharp as a dog's, and as fit for grinding bones."(5) At first glance, anyone would think this passage would be meaningless to a student, as it alludes to the crimes of two obscure medieval figures of whom students know nothing, and it places the sinners in a hell that Dante believes physically exists at the center of our globe. But it is my experience that first-year students can see the significance of this scene in the context of the story they have been reading and discussing. Here we have a chilling example of how the damned do not have their actions forced on them, as no one makes Count Ugolino gnaw on his enemy for the rest of eternity: he chooses it and will go on choosing it forever.(6) Nor is he tortured in a more typically classical or pagan way by having the object of his desire withheld: he has the object of his sinful, hateful desire right before him and he embraces it. I think it expands a first-year student's outlook when he or she sees that for Dante at least, God does not punish sinners, but rather they exile themselves to a world where they can eternally experience their sin without interference, interruption, or mitigation.
In the center of the entire Comedy, Cantos XVII and XVIII of Purgatory, Dante has Virgil discourse on the nature of love. Again, the speech - steeped in scholasticism and put in the mouth of a Roman author of whom many students have never even heard and almost none have read - would seem to be utterly inaccessible to students, as indeed would the whole concept of purgatory, which they vaguely associate with other antique beliefs and practices of their grandparents, like the rosary. But I believe that these are superficial obstacles, and students really can appreciate Dante's honesty and complexity as he struggles to describe how reason, will, and desire interact in the experience of love:
"So, man cannot know where his cognizance
of primal concepts comes from - or his bent
for those primary objects of desire;
these are a part of you, just like the zeal
of bees for making honey; the primal will
is neither laudable nor blamable.
That other wills conform to this first one,
you have the innate faculty of reason,
which should defend the threshold of consent.
Let us assume that every love that burns
in you arises through necessity;
you still have power to restrain such love.
This power Beatrice knows
as Freedom of the Will: remember that,
if ever she should mention it to you."(7)
For Dante, neither reason nor the will can generate or even choose the objects of our desire. The most either can do is refrain from endorsing desire's choice, which is non-negotiable; but at the same time, Dante does not consider desire to be an uncontrollable instinct. How much simpler and more consistent to say that reason or will control desire, or vice versa, but Dante is far too honest to allow himself such simplicity, for neither of these descriptions of love is true to the human experience of it.(8) The result of this honest depiction is a confusion of images, where love is alternately seed,(9) wax,(10) seal,(11) harvest,(12) and flame,(13) as well as one of ideas, where desire and will seem to be conflated into the mysterious entity of "the primal will" - prima voglia - a seemingly significant formulation that appears nowhere else in the Comedy and is never fully explained.(14) I still remember a truly beautiful paper I received four years ago from a student who tried to make sense of these images and ideas by creating another image: complete with a color drawing, she showed how perhaps reason and will worked on desire in the way that a prism divides light into its various colors.(15) Dante had led her to see the profundity of love, and even to engage in some poetic interpretation that by its very nature perpetuated love's mystery as much as it explained it.
Finally, let us consider Dante's conversation with Folquet in Canto IX of Paradise, in which Folquet explains the divisions of the blessed and their relation to their former lives:
"To those who knew it Folquet was my name;
this sphere of heaven bears my imprint now
as from my day of birth I bore its own.
But we do not repent, we smile instead:
not at the sin - this does not come to mind -
but at the Power that orders and provides.
From here we gaze upon that art which works
with such effective love; we see the Good
by which the world below returns above."(16)
Here again, the distance between Dante and ourselves is obvious: he writes in all seriousness of a journey through the spheres of the planets that are arranged in a Ptolemaic system orbiting around the Earth, and he also believes that the celestial bodies exert significant influence over people's lives, all of which is laughable to us today. But again, I believe that our students possess the sophistication necessary to see the relevance of the text. In my experience, they can see the equivalence between the "imprint" of a "sphere of heaven" and an idea more recognizable to us, such as a person's disposition, nature, or personality; and when they see that, they begin to appreciate the beauty of the passage, as God accepts the saved when they learn to accept themselves and all their unique spiritual baggage, and even to see that baggage as part of "the Power that orders and provides," part of "the Good by which the world below returns above." Students are sensitive enough to see that Dante is not a curious oddity from some time and place unrelated to our lives, but that he uses the beliefs and idioms of his time to express the same experiences, ideas, frustrations, and desires that people have always had.
Although Dante's journey takes him through three realms of an afterlife in which many modern students do not believe, and he meets many people whom they do not know, and he asks many questions of which they understand neither the content nor the context, I believe he has affected them so powerfully and consistently because his work ultimately revolves around one very simple but profound idea, and that idea is love, love in all its manifestations and with all its problems. For Dante, love is the essence of all life, human or divine: "Neither Creator nor his creatures ever, my son, lacked love."(17) If our students do not get excited by a topic as fundamentally human as this, then I do not think we should assume it is their fault, nor the fault of reading an outdated old book, but we should consider it is our fault as teachers for not letting the power of Dante's ideas and language take hold of them. When students see us approach such a text with the same curiosity, enthusiasm, and honesty that we had when we were first-year students, then I believe that Dante's genius can transcend the particularity of his historical context and speak to students seven centuries and half a world away, urging, challenging, and enabling them to experience anew his vision of beauty, truth, and love.
Notes
1. It is worth noting the programs in which I have taught Dante, as they are all wonderful - though very different - examples of how to teach classic texts to undergraduates, and none of them are literature or theology classes per se. The Freshman Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame and the Core Humanities Program at Villanova University are both required composition courses taken by all first-year students. One is therefore teaching philosophical, theological, political, and literary texts to future engineers, nurses, and business people: the opportunity to give them their first exposure to such ennobling and humanizing texts before they become completely immersed in pursuing their careers has been the high point of my teaching. On the other hand, it was also very satisfying to teach in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, because the students there were a self-selected group who were majoring in Liberal Arts and who came to the class already captivated by the texts.
2. The others are Erica DePalo, an English major, for her essay on Dostoevsky (1998); Kathryn Kramers, a Biology major, for her essay on Milton (1999); and Jaylynn Peck, a Commerce and Finance major, for her essay on Sophocles (1999).
3. David Champagne (1997).
4. Christopher Updike (1999).
5. Dante, Inferno (trans. Mark Musa; New York: Penguin Books, 1984) XXXIII, 76-78.
6. This neither affirms nor denies whether he still has free will in any real sense: his will may be "perfected" to the point where he will always choose evil (my students usually use the completely appropriate analogy of addiction), but the absence of outside compulsion or punishment from God or devils still seems to be an important part of Dante's message of how sin works.
7. Dante, Purgatory (trans. Mark Musa; New York: Penguin Books, 1985) XVIII, 55-63, 70-75.
8. Even Augustine, a man often maligned as a demanding and unrealistic ascetic and misanthrope, could not reduce love to a simple act of will. See my "God in the Friend, or the Friend in God? The Meaning of Friendship for Augustine," Augustinian Heritage 38 (1992) 123-36; see also J. Lienhard, "Friendship in Paulinus of Nola and Augustine," Augustiniana 40 (1990) 279-96, esp. 296: "Augustine always held on to the human aspect of friendship, to human affection, to the inclinatio, to the delectatio added to dilectio . . . he found it easier to bestow his love on some than on others. Augustine never made his ideas simple by ignoring his experience, and his experience taught him that friendship meant a good deal more than fraternal charity."
9. Dante, Purgatory XVII, 104.
10. Dante, Purgatory XVIII, 37-38.
11. Dante, Purgatory XVIII, 39.
12. Dante, Purgatory XVIII, 66.
13. Dante, Purgatory XVIII, 70.
14. I am basing this on a search I conducted on the website of the Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia [http://www.crs4.it/~riccardo/Letteratura/
DivinaCommedia/DivinaCommedia.html].
15. Laura Zawadski (1996).
16. Dante, Paradise (trans. Mark Musa; New York: Penguin Books, 1986) IX, 94-96, 103-108.
17. Dante, Purgatory XVII, 91-92.