Denys Turner is professor emeritus of historical theology at Yale University and former professor of divinity at Cambridge University. Among his many books are The Darkness of God (1995), Faith Seeking (2002), and Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (2004). This interview was conducted at an April 10 event sponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute in Chicago.
Kenneth L. Woodward: In your book, you argue that in the Divine Comedy, Dante the poet and Dante the theologian are one. I imagine that university archives hold thousands of dissertations on the importance of medieval theology, of Aquinas in particular, to the Comedy, and thousands more on Dante’s poetics—as if the theology were extraneous to the poetry.
Denys Turner: I love universities, but they can sometimes do a lot of damage. One kind of damage they do is setting up distinct academic territories with jealously guarded, firmly policed boundaries separating them. But with Dante’s epic masterpiece—and by the way, Dante never called it “Divine,” just Commedia—you can’t read the poetry without the theology, or the theology without the poetry. The poetry is the theology and the theology is the poetry, and both are of a very high order. So, part of my mission is to help restore Dante the poet to the history of the theology of the spiritual life.
KW: I suspect that most readers encounter the Divine Comedy only in school and at a young age, and even then, they usually only read the Inferno or just parts of it. But you insist over and over again that you cannot understand the Inferno until you have read the Purgatorio, and you can’t understand either until you have finished the Paradiso. Why is that?
DT: As you read the Commedia, a kind of progressive revision takes place so that you understand more about what you have been through as you move on to the next realm. To understand the Commedia, we need the whole story. I don’t think Dante could have written the Inferno unless he already had the Purgatorio and the Paradiso in mind, because the Inferno makes little sense except as a part of the whole poem.
KW: The end of the Purgatorio has an almost mystical quality to it. Do you think that Dante himself had a mystical experience in the way that, say, St. Paul had a mystical experience?
DT: He’s very like St. Paul, isn’t he? The Pauline experience is a very illuminating comparison. Paul does not die and go to Heaven; he’s taken up into the Third Heaven before death. When he comes down he feels compelled to preach—but how? He doesn’t preach the experience—he knows he can’t—but everything he does preach comes from that experience. And so with Dante. He can write the whole of his poem because of an experience that he describes at the end of the poem. You have to think of that experience as the author of the poem, not the end of it. Or perhaps it’s both.
KW: In the end is our beginning, to quote T. S. Eliot.
DT: Yes, exactly.
KW: In your discussion of the Inferno, you insist that although Dante tours Hell as a living pilgrim, he “really does go through Hell.”
DT: Before doing this interview, I thought that I wouldn’t get into the business of whether Hell exists or not. But I will say this: talk about Hell is essential. You have to imagine its existence, otherwise you cannot imagine what sin is. I think it is perfectly possible to read the Inferno and say, “Yes, he’s got it absolutely right,” and also say that Hell doesn’t exist—or even, that it is there, but it is eternally empty.
KW: How so?
DT: Because the Inferno is Dante’s attempt to give a theological account of the significance of sin. He’s saying, “This is what sin is and what life would be like if all there were was sin. Life becomes utterly pointless forever, and this is something you have to be able to face.”
KW: You write that Dante the Narrator and Dante the Narrated are one. What does Dante the Narrated learn from his journey to the bottom of Hell?
DT: I’d say he comes to understand that Hell involves a grinding self-knowledge, that when living in sin we are stuck within our fabricated wants. We are defined by them. The people he encounters in Hell are condemned to endless repetition of their chosen sin. They cannot change. They are stuck.
KW: And at the bottom of Hell is Satan, the fallen angel who cannot even move, cannot make a sound.
DT: There’s no exit. That’s a psychology of evil that Dante invents and I think it’s phenomenally acute.
KW: Sartre’s No Exit?
DT: Sartre’s Hell is not irrelevant here. It’s the place where other people are. They constitute your Hell because you can’t relate to them.
KW: Well, Dante’s Inferno is certainly crowded with other people—popes, politicians…
DT: Remember, Dante was a politician as well as a poet, and there’s plenty of political payback—revenge even—in his poem. But Hell is crowded because it is a community. That’s what I mean when I write that in order to understand Dante’s epic and the ethical demands it makes on the reader, we must accept Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven as real places—that is, as distinct communities or regimes.
KW: How is Hell a community?
DT: It’s a pseudo-community. We all are familiar with communities that are hell to live in because they destroy rather than enhance the human flourishing of their inhabitants. Dante’s Inferno is a community that exists by isolating people from each other as well as from God.
KW: So interpreting the Commedia as an individualistic spiritual journey would be wrong?
DT: Absolutely! Dante is very much the communitarian, just as Catholicism is inherently communitarian.
KW: In what sense is Purgatory a community?
DT: Notice when you read the Purgatorio: as Dante and Virgil climb the mountain of purgation, they are never alone. At every level there are always crowds of sinners and penitents, all of whom are carrying sacks on their backs in long lines or doing something else, but they’re always doing it together. Purgatory, in contrast to Hell, begins the restoration of people back to the community to which they essentially belong, the place where they can be who they truly are precisely because they live in this community.
KW: You write that the entire Comedy is a purgative poem. In what way?
DT: Because it is about dying well. I’m as ecumenical as anyone, but to be honest, my friends in other religious traditions who think of Purgatory as an incidental Catholic eccentricity and won’t have anything to do with it are missing something hugely important. Just speaking for myself, I can’t imagine going to Heaven the way I am now, because I think Heaven deserves a whole lot better than that. Nor would I actually like it if Heaven were just a continuation of what I already am. There’s got to be something better and I need work to get there.
KW: The eminent medieval historian Jacques Le Goff hailed Dante’s Purgatorio as “the noblest representation of Purgatory ever conceived by the mind of man.” One of the things that struck me as novel was how Dante, after enduring a painful personal purgation of the seven deadly sins, is still not suitable for admission to Paradise. All he has accomplished, with Virgil the virtuous pagan as his guide, is achieving the kind of innocence that Adam and Eve enjoyed before the Fall.
DT: The idea of Purgatory—the need for purgation—goes all the way back at least to the first century CE. Dante comes along much later and narrates Purgatory in a way that doctrinal writings don’t. He makes it a narrative of the spiritual life.
KW: As I read the Purgatorio, Dante is showing us that works alone—or better, our own best efforts—are not enough to merit heaven. That’s something the Protestant Reformers agreed with and insisted on three centuries later.
DT: Yes, and in that the Protestants were right. Remember that, throughout the Purgatorio, Dante is propelled forward by a growing desire for God. At the same time, it is God’s love for Dante that pulls him up out of sin.
KW: Still, I was not at all prepared for the closing cantos of the Purgatorio where Dante’s beloved Beatrice finally makes her appearance and—boom—she comes on like a scolding fishwife.
DT: Yes, those closing cantos are one of the crucial turning points I mentioned where everything that we’ve read so far has to be seen in a different light. Dante has just completed a steep ascetical journey and he thinks he is now fit for Paradise. Beatrice says, “What I’m here to tell you is you are not. You needed to go through these stages of moral reform. You got yourself out of Hell and through Purgatory and now you’re pleased with yourself for having done it. But you haven’t even started. What you’ve got to do next is get rid of this whole story of yourself as a reformed sinner that you have created for yourself.”
KW: And that Dante has created for the reader?
DT: Yes, exactly. What Dante the protagonist needs to do, Beatrice tells him, is lose that old self and the story that goes with it. Until he lets go of them, he can’t move on and allow grace to do its work. That’s why he has to be immersed in “the ocean of forgetfulness.” For readers, of course, this new turn revises the whole narrative of sin and salvation that we’ve read until now. You think you’ve got the story and you are told, no, you haven’t even begun to understand how the story of salvation works.
KW: Ocean of forgetfulness—that’s a powerful image and concept Dante has created. Is there any support for this in mystical theology?
DT: It’s there in the works of St. John of the Cross; he has a similar story and a similar experience. His first book, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, is about asceticism and purgation of the self, but it is in his successor volume, The Dark Night of the Soul, where the real thing happens. That’s where all the light that you have created for yourself disappears and you become detached from that idea of self-achieved progress. He’s not drawing on Dante, but both draw on independent sources in the theological tradition.
KW: So the way to heaven is not just about doing penance and moral reform. Isn’t that what Martin Luther struggled with as a monk?
DT: Yes, and I would say it was the failure of the Church to teach this that made Lutheranism possible, because without the pull of grace it is essentially Pelagianism.
KW: According to repeated surveys, most people think of Heaven, if they think about Heaven at all, as a place where they will see God face to face and as a place where they will be reunited with family and friends—though not necessarily in that order.
DT: In the Paradiso, Dante is trying to get the reader to understand that Heaven is so much bigger than just getting a few happy kicks for all eternity. It’s very difficult to give an account of Heaven. If you understand Hell as anti-community chaos, then you can understand that Heaven is the opposite of that. But because we have never experienced Heaven, I think it is impossible to give an account of Heaven that is not in some sense also an account of Hell.
KW: Meaning every account of Heaven is bound to fail?
DT: And ought to fail. Dante knows this, which is why he writes toward the end of the Paradiso that words fail him—as they did, by the way, when he experiences the silence surrounding Satan in the deepest part of Hell. There he says, in effect, “I haven’t got language foul enough to get the truth of Hell across to you.” Why? Because Hell exists precisely as the absence of meaning, the absence of truth, and therefore the absence of the possibility of poetry.
KW: So why do words fail him in Heaven?
DT: Let me answer this way. Poetry brings Dante the pilgrim to Paradise because Purgatory is the poetics of how to speak given that we the readers, like Dante the writer, are purgatorial people. Purgatory is where we are and that’s where poetry is possible. In Heaven, poetry ceases because in the end, Heaven is unsayable.
KW: But before his words give way to silence, Dante gives us thirty-three cantos of an imagined Paradise. And one of the great attractions of the Paradiso is that no matter how close or how distant the citizens of heaven are from the center where God is, they exhibit no jealousy or pride of station, which surprises Dante the pilgrim.
DT: If the citizens of Heaven were to exhibit pride of place, it would be Hell, not Heaven. As I said, Heaven is a community, the community we were created for.
KW: I suspect one reason most imaginings of Heaven fail to attract even believers is because they are dull and static: choirs of angels singing, staring at God. Same old, same old, for all eternity.
DT: But that is exactly what happens in Dante’s Inferno. Those he meets in Hell are eternally defined. They have defined themselves and nothing ever changes.
KW: How does change occur in the Paradiso?
DT: First, let’s not forget that Dante is there as an outsider, a learner. And those he meets there are all teachers. They’re always saying, “Listen, if you want to understand Heaven then understand what we do here. We talk this way with each other, which goes way beyond your capacity to understand because you don’t even understand what it takes to move step by step within this infinity of learning.”
KW: Infinite learning—it’s difficult to grasp.
DT: Sure, but I like the idea myself—I wouldn’t love books if I didn’t. Obviously, though, we’re not talking about book learning. We’re talking about a dynamic that is central to Aquinas’s conception of learning—infinite gratification of the intellect. There’s nothing static about that. Yes, it’s difficult to grasp, but then so is the idea of eternity itself.
KW: In the end, though, it is the will, not the intellect, that is moved. As Dante writes: “But now my will and my desire were turned / as if by wheels of equilibrium / by love that moves the sun and other stars.” You describe the Commedia as “a coherent story, the telling of which amounts to a call to the conversion of intellect and will, made by the summons of an ultimate love.” Is it possible, then, that if one reads the Commedia as a theology of the spiritual life that such a reader could be transformed spiritually as a result?
DT: Well, Dante’s answer would be yes. In one of his prose pieces he argues that his poem should be read the same way as the Bible—that is, according to the four senses: the literal, the analogical, the mystical, and the moral. Because that is how the Holy Spirit speaks: through us, and by way of our best means, which is poetry.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
Kenneth L. Woodward, former Religion Editor of Newsweek, is currently writer-in-residence at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago.
Reproduced with permission from Commonweal Magazine.
