tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17586860.post5208657932362672180..comments2023-08-26T10:15:36.123-04:00Comments on Classics in Sarasota: The sin of synecdocheTom Matrullohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11460789537848811061noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17586860.post-89688532790982538682016-01-30T21:15:25.642-05:002016-01-30T21:15:25.642-05:00I would agree that there is a strong didactic comp...I would agree that there is a strong didactic component to the Commedia, but I think the poem, seen only as such, is open to being seen as a static tome without the dynamics of dialogue, doubt, and surprise. In addition to the pedagogic mission there is the autobiographical story of the sinner who journeyed from being near spiritual death in the dark wood through a series of challenges, lessons, questionings, hesitations and discoveries. I do not think Dante ever took anything as "gospel" simply because some Authority handed it to him - if nothing else, the recurrent motif of doubt as a key natural element of one's personal paideia - brings into play the necessity for mind and heart to probe and wrestle with stumbling blocks many share. A full unquestioning acceptance of the counterintuitive elements of revealed doctrine is not, for this poet, or this poem, something to be assumed. Rather, it is worked through. There are also the sharp tensions between the authorities of the ancients, including the basic assumptions about order and origins found Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Plato, and others, vs. the revealed beliefs about a very different cosmos in the Hebraic/Christian tradition - tensions which Dante was too good a reader not to be fully sensible of. The Paradiso seems more interesting to me this time precisely because it has a dynamism in its development that gives it new life -- in short, I'm enjoying it more!<br /> Tom Matrullohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11460789537848811061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17586860.post-19122988506490078892016-01-30T14:37:44.705-05:002016-01-30T14:37:44.705-05:00I think Dante gears his work to believers who don&...I think Dante gears his work to believers who don't quite understand (or never closely examined) the intricacies of Christian dogma. He's not trying to make converts out of heathens--that's for the Domini canes and Franciscans. He's explaining to the average literate Christian of his day exactly how he thinks the whole machinery of the universe works. He's also reinforcing the belief of those who already know. Remember that the whole world of Aquinian theology, crammed full of Aristotelian logic and "science," had only been unleashed on the Christian world when Dante was a boy--this was new heady stuff! Who knew of it in Florence or Europe? one person out of a thousand? If that.<br />Going back to the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption, I would say that God, being who he is, had no choice (from Eternity) of resolving man's debt to him in that way. Does Dante's God have choice? I think the term itself is alien to him, since his actions can be said to follow absolutely logically and consistently from his essence--if we only keep in mind his nature. But St. Anselm had already argued this in "Cur Deus Homo?" 200 years before the Paradiso.Pete D'Epirohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05587788179975446908noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17586860.post-42425022784033811352016-01-30T12:51:11.375-05:002016-01-30T12:51:11.375-05:00Thanks Pete - that's a superb way of expressin...Thanks Pete - that's a superb way of expressing the first alternative - "a surprising accounting." And I agree that Dante's sense of his God can be described as hyper-rational - he has Beatrice go through the logic of the Fall and Incarnation to explore how that might be in some detail. Once one brings in the Infinite (to a reader accepting of what that can be in this context), tensions tend to disappear. I'm not sure they have. Do you think the poet is gearing his writing to men and women are full-formed believers, or to people who perhaps wish to believe?Tom Matrullohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11460789537848811061noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17586860.post-12319633099644640962016-01-30T12:13:19.639-05:002016-01-30T12:13:19.639-05:00Tom--Thanks for bringing us to the edge of the aby...Tom--Thanks for bringing us to the edge of the abyss, but I think Beatrice's and Dante's God is the opposite of mad. I see him acting hyper-rationally, in the way mathematics (his creation) also must do. I would express the answer to your paradox ("A debtor satisfies his indebtedness thanks to his creditor's both assuming his debt and undergoing harsh pains to pay it off") as follows:<br /><br />Infinite Justice/divided by Infinite Love = the Atonement.<br /><br />We can compare this debt to human ones (just as the Bible always uses figures drawn from human life to express the ineffable), but the difference is that here the creditor is God, and that difference is quite simply infinite.Pete D'Epirohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05587788179975446908noreply@blogger.com