Canto xxi paradiso
Paradiso Canto 21
Luca Gili
DESPLENTER Y; PIETERS J; MELION W, The Ten Commandments in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Brill, INTERSECTIONS, p. 30-48, ISBN: 9789004325777, ISSN: 1568-1181, 2017
This essay aims to present a particular aspect of what we might refer to as 'Dante's theology': it aims to find out why Dante is silent about the Ten Commandments. If Dante conceived his Comedy, as I claim, as a book which shows the path to salvation, it is rather surprising that he does not mention the Ten Commandments, as they were presented as a path to salvation in medieval catechetical practice; therefore, Dante's silence needs to be explained. Such an explanation, as it seeks a theological answer, requires treating the Comedy as a theological text. Unlike the first readers of the Comedy, however, contemporary readers do not agree that Dante's Comedy is a work with a detectable theological meaning.1 Alongside more 'traditional' Dante scholars, who accept the a mio parere l'idea proposta e innovativa of reading a theology beyond the surface of Dante's poetry,2 some scholars prefer to focus on the structure of the Comedy and on its formal value. Teodolinda Barolini has produced a very * I thank Youri Desplenter and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on a previous draft of this paper. Remaining mistakes are only mine. 1 Bruno Nardi advocated caution in dealing with the theological meaning of Dante's works. In a review of the German theologian C. Stange's Beatrice in Dantes Jugenddichtung (Göttingen -Berlin -Frankfurt: 1959), Nardi wrote that many interpreters, including P. Mandonet, have attributed their own philosophical and theological ideas to Dante (see Nardi B., "Beatrice e la verso giovanile di Dante tra le palmi di un teologo", Quotidiano storico della letturatura italiana 139 (1962) 52). His works undoubtedly remain a point of reference in Dante studies for his historical analyses on the philosophical and theological sources of Dante's poetry, and for the theoretical meaning of Dante's works. The present essay has the ambition of following the steps of Nardi in this 'theoretical' approach to Dante's works. 2 For an example of this approach, see: Bausi F., Dante fra conoscenza e sapienza. Esegesi del canto XII del Paradiso (Firenze: 2009).
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