Dante’s Divine Comedy: Educating for the Joy of God
When he had brought his lecture to an end,
the lofty scholar looked into my face,
searching to see if I seemed satisfied;
and I, already thirsting for more drink,
kept silent, wondering:”Could he, perhaps,
be tired of all this questioning of mine?”
But that true father, sensing my desire,
which was too timid to express itself,
spoke first, and thus encouraged me to speak. (Purgatorio XVIII, l. 1-91)
In his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) creates himself as a character in his own work of art and unfolds before our imagination the process of his complete education, on an allegorical journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven (for “there was no other way to save his soul,” as Beatrice explains in Purgatorio XXXI). “The lofty scholar” above is Virgil, and the one who says “I” throughout the poem is Dante “the Pilgrim.” Dante was both scholar and student himself, and his teacher of predilection was St. Thomas Aquinas, who had died only ten years after Dante’s birth.2 The education which the Pilgrim receives over the course of the Commedia is in fact a Thomistic education. In the passage quoted above, the pilgrim Dante and his maestro Virgil are halfway through their climb of Mount Purgatory, and their discussion in these central cantos of the Divine Comedy takes us to the core of the principles of St. Thomas on teaching. Virgil, the educator, true father, attentive to the soul entrusted to him, seeks every means to satisfy the blessed thirst which God placed at the core of every man. “Sensing my desire,” in a union of charity, Virgil “spoke first, and thus encouraged me to speak,” to act, to choose, in an apprenticeship of freedom which will end finally with the gift of Dante’s will to God in the enjoyment of the beatific vision. In the following pages, I would like to offer the words of the poet as illustrations of the teaching principles of St. Thomas. I have chosen the verses and scenes which most struck me in the classroom and in my own reading as embodiments of St. Thomas’ vivifying ideas. I hope this taste will encourage other Catholic educators to open the Divine Comedy and drink for themselves with confidence at the source.
Education: A Participation in God’s Creative Love
“One of the great pleasures of the intelligence is in unity, in fruitful unity,” writes Dom Paul Delatte,3 and the “fruitful unity” of the Divine Comedy and of St. Thomas’ philosophy of teaching is in the notion of love. “That true father, sensing my desire… spoke first, and thus encouraged me to speak… ‘So I beseech you, father, kind and dear,’” begins the disciple Dante, heartened by Virgil, “define love for me, please.” Dante constructed his Divine Comedy on love: the “geography” of the realms and the movement of souls are determined by relation to the love of God. So also does St. Thomas establish his philosophy of education on the love of God: the first principle behind the nature and the movement of teaching is the goodness of God, origin of all things, the divine Freedom creating in an unexplainable act of love. “The divine goodness is the cause of things’ being brought into existence, for God wished to communicate His goodness to others as far as this was possible to creatures,” writes St. Thomas in his treatise On Providence. Love is the mystery of God, an eternal procession within His Trinitarian life and the motive of all His external action. God creates souls out of love, in order that they might love Him, and He allows educators to participate in His creative love by giving them a power to help souls attain their perfection of freely choosing Him.
The Soul “Sprung from Her Creator’s Joy”
From the first canto of the Inferno, we learn that the stars shine because “Divine love set their beauty turning” (l. 40).
Looking upon His Son with all that love
which each of them breathes forth eternally,
that uncreated, ineffable first One,
has fashioned all that moves in mind and space
in such sublime proportions that no one
can see it and not feel His presence there. (Paradiso X, l. 1-6)
We “feel His presence there,” looking to the Heavens, by the stars’ reflection of God’s uncreated, absolute perfection. Creation mirrors God; we perceive its order and proportion like a radiance, a ray of being shining back in witness to God’s infinite Being. The heavens recount the glory of God, the Psalmist sings, and He calls all the stars by name,4 but His spiritual creation is dearest to Him, because each soul is capable of reflecting back to God not only the simple radiance of its being but also a particular, personal love. Angels and men, spiritual beings, reflect God more intimately, and the progress of education is a progress of increasing this resemblance to God. The souls at the base of Mount Purgatory are urged on the path “to make their beauty whole” (Purgatorio II, l. 75), to perfect the particular union of mind and will with their Creator which will define them as saints. Each sanctified personality is “a facet of the immeasurable Diamond of Divine Perfections,” as the Dominican Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré expresses it: “God is so inexhaustible in Perfection that each one of the elect is entrusted with reflecting one of the little sparks of His boundless radiance and so represents as it were an aspect of His Beauty.”5
Education is therefore a preparation to adore. “Thy kingdom come to us with all its peace,” pray the souls in the first Terrace of the Purgatorio,
And as Thine angels offer up their wills
to Thee in sacrifice, singing Hosannah,
let all men offer up to Thee their own.” (Purgatorio XI, l. 7-12)
This return of love for love constitutes the beauty of the personality. “The love that makes me beautiful / moves me to speak,” begins St. Bonaventure in Canto XII of the Paradiso (l. 31-32). Love makes beautiful; “sin is the only power that takes away / man’s freedom and his likeness to True Good,” Beatrice explains, “and makes him shine less brightly in Its light” (Paradiso VII, l. 79-81). In the first sphere of the Paradiso, the sphere of the changing moon, we meet the soul of Piccarda, who “was a virgin sister in the world,” but whom family members obliged to leave the convent and not fulfill her vows. She is blissful but pale in her reflection of God, her face barely discernible, and the reason is her instability of will, consenting in some degree to her removal from the cloister. When Beatrice in her clear, dazzling beauty, looked at Dante after the departure of Piccarda, he explains,
her eyes
sparkling with love and burning so divine,
my strength of sight surrendered to her power –
I was about to faint. (Paradiso IV, l. 139-142)
As star differs from star in brightness, soul differs from soul in beauty: in the degree of gift of will to God.
Our action flows from what we are. Despite original sin, the soul yearns for its Creator because sprung from His love and made for Him, and the Catholic educator has to recognize this fundamental feature of every child before him. In the central canto of the Divine Comedy, Virgil describes to Dante the direct creation of each human soul, fashioned by God’s tenderness:
“From the fond hands of God, Who loves her even
before He gives her being, there issues forth
just like a child, all smiles and tears at play,
the simple soul, pure in its ignorance,
which, having sprung from her Creator’s joy,
will turn to anything it likes.” (Purgatorio XVI, l. 85-90)
The soul, “sprung from her Creator’s joy,” is joy-aimed. She is God-aimed, good-aimed, on a quest of loving inclination to fill her spiritual capacity for absolute Joy.
“The soul at birth, created quick to love
will move toward anything that pleases it,
as soon as pleasure causes it to move,”
Virgil explains, and he answers Dante’s question: “that inclination is love.”
“Just as a fire’s flames always rise up,
inspired by its own nature to ascend,
seeking to be in its own element,
just so, the captive soul begins its quest,
the spiritual movement of its love,
not resting till the thing loved is enjoyed.” (Purgatorio XVIII, l. 19-33)
Pope Pius XII refers to this same section in the Divine Comedy to show the God-instilled dynamism of the soul toward the good and at the same time the child’s need for guidance in the choice of particular goods:
An irresistible instinct for the true and the good carries the “simple soul which as yet knows nothing” toward sensible objects; and all this sensibility, all of these sensations of the child… need an education, an instruction, a vigilant direction… if we are to avoid any compromise or falsifying of the normal awakening and regular function of the noble spiritual faculties.6
The fundamental inclination of the soul to good, which St. Thomas calls synderesis, exists in a fallen nature, and the child needs an education to virtue which will habituate him to recognize and choose legitimate goods. Love is “the source of every virtue, every vice” (Purgatorio XVIII, l. 15), because the intention of the will to love rightly determines the moral value of an act. Virtue “winnows out the good love from the bad” (ibid., l. 66), the objects worthy of man’s choice from those which lead him away from his end. The educator’s role is to help the child recognize “the good love,” nourishing the child’s imagination by surrounding him in order and beauty, habituating him to love uprightly, training his reason to recognize truth and discern the virtuous action.
The Soul Sealed with the Light of God
Throughout the domains of the Inferno and the Purgatorio the poet insists that the mind’s desire to know is insatiable because the only good which will entirely fill the intellect is the vision of God. Virgil fosters Dante’s healthy thirst for knowledge, urging him to question and discover. In Canto XX of the Purgatorio, Dante describes his “violent desire for the truth” (l. 147) at the shaking of the mountain, utterly unexpected and accompanied by a great cry of Gloria in excelsis Deo:
The natural thirst which nothing satisfies
except that water begged for long ago
by the poor woman of Samaria
Tormented me… (Purgatorio XXI, l. 1-4).
In this permanent thirst of our intellect, which nothing slakes but the vision of God, we again see the mark of the Creator on our souls. In his treatise on The Teacher, St. Thomas calls the created light of reason “a kind of likeness of the uncreated truth.” “The human mind is divinely illuminated by its natural light,” St. Thomas explains, and he quotes Psalm 4, which the Church sings every Sunday at Compline: “Signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine,” “The light of Your countenance is signed upon us.” By our intellect, we are stamped with the seal of God’s own power to know.7
As we saw the educator strengthening the student’s will to choose the good, so also the teacher is a strengthener of the intellect, not somehow injecting his ideas into the mind of the child but instrumentally helping the child form true concepts and actively draw conclusions. We saw Virgil encouraging Dante to ask the question he was too timid to express; throughout the Inferno, along the paths which Virgil had already trodden, we see him continually foreseeing the route and adapting his pedagogy to foster Dante’s learning. Whether alerting Dante to what he will encounter, allowing Dante to live an experience and then formulate his own questions, or pausing to give philosophical explanations and discuss the reasons for what they have seen, Virgil is always aiming at the most effective manner of awakening Dante to grasp truth for himself. St. Thomas explains, “The teacher’s presentations are like tools that the natural reason of the student uses to come to an understanding of things previously unknown to him.” As the doctor gives medicine so that the body will heal itself, so the educator fulfills all of his tasks so that the student’s soul will reach knowledge and virtue by its own power.8 “Our role in class,” confirms Dominican Mother Hélène Jamet in a letter to teaching Sisters,
is principally to help each child to discover, in each domain, and in an atmosphere of generosity and freedom… the few central notions which he must make his own and which he must be able to use as his own.”9
The educator initiates and mediates the process of discovery, but the mind of the student works his own knowledge, just as his will works virtue.
The Teacher: A Manifestation of the Goodness of God
St. Thomas insists that the teacher is genuinely a cause of goodness and knowledge in the child, albeit instrumental. The teacher really does share in God’s power to do good; the educator saves. “Virgil, sweet father,” Dante cries, “Virgil to whom for my salvation I gave up my soul” (Purgatorio XXX, l. 50-51). It is Beatrice by her action who has brought Dante to the heights at which she leaves him:
She, with the tone and gesture of a guide
whose task is done, said: “We have gone beyond –
from greatest sphere to heaven of pure light,
light of the intellect, light full of love,
love of the true good, full of ecstasy,
ecstasy that transcends the sweetest joy.” (Paradiso XXX, l. 37-42)
The teacher collaborates with God in bringing the soul to such sublimity. God has “woven [the created universe] together by the order and interconnection of causes”: the order of the universe is a fabric of interdependence, “for the primary Cause, from Its outstanding goodness, makes other things not only to be, but also to be causes.”10
Just like the sun’s outpoured rays, which not only illumine other bodies but make them to be sources of light, too… similarly, in the ordering of the universe, as a result of the outpouring of God’s goodness, superior creatures [men and angels] are not only good in themselves, but also are causes of goodness in others.11
Virgil and Beatrice stabilize Dante in truth and in orientation toward the good by guiding him to perform acts of discovery and freedom. The angels in the Paradiso illustrate the interconnection of teachers and students in human education:
All of the angelic ranks gaze upward,
as downward they prevail upon the rest,
so while each draws the next, all draw toward God. (Paradiso XXIX, l. 127-129)
Through all those who educate, God is glorified by His goodness in sharing His power.
The Sacred Acts of Education
St. Thomas begins at these heights when he speaks of education. The immediate and glorious filiation of every human soul from the hand of God makes it a sacred thing, and baptism brings this resemblance of nature to a sonship in grace. “When I say that [a child] resembles God by his baptism,” writes Fr. de Chivré,
I am saying that he resembles three Persons… It is the joy of the father, the joy of the mother… to sense in [their child] a heart beating in unison with three Persons… As a priest, I have to tell you that your children have spiritual reactions that you do not even suspect.12
Every educator–priest, parent or teacher–moves in a divine realm, acting as an instrument to bring the intellect and will into the fullness of a divinely-bestowed power to act, helping strengthen the soul in its God-given, God-aimed movement. “The end of education is that the child come to prefer freely and forever the true over the false, good over evil, the just over the unjust, beauty over ugliness, and God over all,” explains theologian and educator Fr. Victor-Alain Berto.13 The educators whom we encounter in Dante’s Divine Comedy offer us models to apply these principles faithfully, in actions that are true to the sacredness of our task.
Education Is Charity and Generosity
Dante asks Virgil to define love for him, but Virgil’s actions have been defining love from the first moment he took Dante under his care. “Have pity on my soul,” are the first words cried out by Dante, lost in the “dark wood,” to the dim figure approaching, in the first canto of the Commedia. Virgil’s mission of goodness was initiated by the pity of the Blessed Virgin: “A gracious lady sits in heaven grieving… and her compassion breaks Heaven’s stern decree” (Inferno II, l. 94-96). Education is an act of mercy, descending to the aid of a misery, a need in the student, and it is rooted in the paternal mercy of God. “Anyone who exercises providence over another shares in the character of a father,” St. Thomas writes in his Summa Theologica (IIaIIae, q. 102, a. 1). Virgil the teacher is a father to Dante, and education is a process of paternal tenderness.
Envy has no entry where teaching is participation in divine goodness. Virgil’s mission began in a conspiracy of intercession, the Blessed Virgin sending St. Lucy who sent Beatrice to summon Virgil from Limbo to help the wandering Dante. Virgil “crowns and miters [Dante] lord of himself” at the top of Mount Purgatory (Purgatorio XXVII, l. 142) and passes his charge on to Beatrice, the blessed; Beatrice herself passes Dante finally to St. Bernard (Paradiso XXXI), so that he might intercede with the Blessed Virgin to obtain for Dante a glimpse of the beatific vision before his time. Envy has no place in sanctified society: “The more souls there above who are in love / the more there are worth loving,” explains Virgil (Purgatorio XV, l. 73-74), and the souls in the sphere of Mars sing out, “Behold one more who will increase our love,” as Virgil and Beatrice approach (Paradiso V, l. 105). “Never be jealous of your influence,” writes Fr. Berto.
We can never be too many doing good. Moreover, be sure that your influence will increase to the extent that you facilitate that of others. Do not forget that souls are born for God, and that it would be a crime to stop them at ourselves.14
The educator is entirely focused outside of himself, on the good which he desires the student to obtain. When Dante and Beatrice pass into the sphere of the sun and Dante finds himself more open to the divine light and approaching the goal of his quest, he momentarily forgets his guide. “And now give thanks,” Beatrice says, “thanks to the Sun of Angels by whose grace you have ascended to this sun of sense.”
No mortal heart was ever more disposed
to do devotion and to yield itself
to God so fully and so readily
than mine was at her words. So totally
did I direct all of my love to Him,
that Beatrice, eclipsed, had left my mind.
But this did not displease her, and she smiled
so that the splendor of her laughing eyes
broke my mind’s spell. (Paradiso X, l. 52-63)
The educator who is in order delights to be eclipsed by the light and to see his student gradually confirmed in confident, independent, virtuous action.
This sacred generosity sparks in the student a desire for the good and the energy to pursue it. “Love, / kindled by virtue, always kindles love” (Purgatorio XXII, l. 10-11), and the virtuous love of the teacher inspires love in the student. Dante describes his final firm resolve to begin the path to virtue: at Virgil’s words,
…such warm courage flowed into my heart
that I spoke like a man set free of fear:
“O she, compassionate, who moved to help me!
And you, all kindness, in obeying quick
those words of truth she brought with her for you –
you and the words you spoke have moved my heart
with such desire to continue onward
that now I have returned to my first purpose.
Let us start, for both our wills, joined now, are one.
You are my guide, you are my lord and teacher.”
These were my words to him and, when he moved,
I entered on that deep and rugged road. (Inferno II, l. 131-142)
At every step of the rugged road, Virgil is ready with attentive goodness. Virgil and Beatrice guide Dante out of love, and love binds him to his guides: their wills are one, joined in desire for the same good.
Education Is an Apprenticeship of Trust
Rather than obedience, Virgil asks of Dante trust. The Pilgrim trembles at the moment of passing through the gates to “the Doleful City”: “Abandon every hope, all you who enter.” “‘Master, I said, ‘these words I see are cruel.’”
He answered me, speaking with experience:
“Now here you must leave all distrust behind;
let all your cowardice die on this spot.
We are at the place where earlier I said
you could expect to see the suffering race
of souls who lost the good of intellect.”
Placing his hand on mine, smiling at me
in such a way that I was reassured,
he led me in, into those mysteries. (Inferno III, l. 1-21)
Virgil’s rational encouragement is joined to gestures of affection, and Dante finds the strength to move forward.
Yet dangers are real, particularly in the Inferno. Gorgons perched on the walls of the City of Dis, the domain of hell reserved for the demonic sins of malice, summon Medusa to freeze Dante’s will with despair. The threat is not empty: Virgil not only warns Dante, “Turn your back and cover up your eyes,” but as Dante tells us, “he turned me round / and did not trust my hands to hide my eyes / but placed his own on mine and kept them covered” (Inferno IX, l. 55-60). Half of the voyage through the Inferno is spent in the realms of fraud and treachery, and Virgil has to be particularly on his guard for his charge. They travel down into these lowest depths on the back of the mythical dragon Geryon, “that repulsive spectacle of fraud,” “the one that makes the whole world stink” by the rotting corruption of death it causes in society.
His face was the face of any honest man,
it shone with such a look of benediction;
and all the rest of him was serpentine. (Inferno XVII, l. 1-12)
Virgil does not let Dante witness his negotiation with this “malignant beast,” but sends him out of earshot. When Dante returned, he tells us,
I found my guide already sitting high
upon the back of that fierce animal;
he said: “And now, take courage and be strong…
Get on up front. I want to ride behind,
to be between you and the dangerous tail.”
…I felt those stabs of shame that make
a servant brave before his valorous master.
As I squirmed around on those enormous shoulders,
I wanted to cry out, “Hold on to me,”
but I had no voice to second my desire.
Then he who once before had helped me out
when I was threatened put his arms around me
as soon as I was settled, and held me tight… (Inferno XVII, l. 79-96)
Virgil’s prudence and Dante’s docility make every experience serve Dante’s growth in virtue.
A trusting, ordered affection makes Dante quick to receive guidance from Virgil and saddened at the least hint of displeasing his educator. “All absorbed” in the low debate between two souls in the Inferno, Virgil said to him merely, “Keep right on looking, / a little more, and I shall lose my patience.”
I heard the note of anger in his voice,
and turned to him; I was so full of shame
that it still haunts my memory today…
“Less shame than yours would wash away a fault
greater than yours has been,” my master said,
“and so forget about it, do not be sad.
If ever again you should meet up with men
engaging in this kind of futile wrangling,
remember I am always at your side;
to have a taste for talk like this is vulgar!” (Inferno XXX, l. 130-148)
This filial turning to his maestro forms Dante’s conscience; it is an exercise of sursum corda, an act of openness preparing him for the divine light that will eventually flow directly into his strengthened eyes.
Virgil encourages Dante to trust so that he might learn to act on his own. “O my dear son,” Virgil reassures Dante, as they are about to pass through the wall of purifying fire at the top of Mount Purgatory,
“Remember all your memories! If I
took care of you when we rode Geryon,
shall I do less when we are nearer God?...
It’s time, high time, to put away your fears;
turn towards me, come, and enter without fear!” (Purgatorio XXVII, l. 20-24, 31-32)
Perfect love casts out fear, and Virgil uses all his influence to bring Dante toward a final act of will, confirming him in the pursuit of good.
A Curriculum of Beauty
“Good perceived as good enkindles love,” Dante answers St. John, who is testing the graduate for entry to the vision of God (Paradiso XXVI, l. 28). In the Inferno, Virgil mediated Dante’s journey through the disorder of those “who lost the good of intellect,” but it is particularly in the Purgatorio that we see the chosen curriculum of the Church for souls in grace. Before the joy of the Beatific Vision, souls advance in the joy of the Beatitudes. Christian art surrounds Dante as he climbs: “all the inner cliff” of the first Terrace of Purgatory “was pure white marble,” forming an image of the Annunciation. Gabriel, “carved in an attitude of marble grace, / an effigy that could have spoken words,” seems to be saying “Ave!”
for she who turned the key, opening for us
the Highest Love, was also figured there;
the outlines of her image carved the words
Ecce ancilla Dei, as clearly cut
as is the imprint of a seal on wax. (Purgatorio X, l. 29-42)
Song, story, drama, history sacred and profane… organized, ordered, infuse order in souls. Fr. Calmel indicates an application of this same principle of educating through art:
In school, what has in itself the most power to form the children – whether girls or boys – is their contact with beautiful works (and later on with a philosophical and theological teaching) that express man in the use he makes of his freedom.15
The liturgy of the Church envelops souls in their climb up Mount Purgatory. “I could hear voices,” Dante tells us from the third Terrace;
Each prayer they sang began with Agnus Dei;
the same words, sung in unison, produced
an atmosphere of perfect harmony. (Purgatorio XVI, l.16-21)
“There is no infallible means of education,” warns Fr. Berto, “but we hold for certain that education through Gregorian chant is the best, being the most theological and at the same time the most apt to forge characters.”16 Dante educates as the Church educates: through beauty, to adoration.
Invitation to Receive a Tradition
“I think it best you follow me,” is Virgil’s invitation to Dante in the first canto of the Divine Comedy. St. Thomas describes education as a leading by the hand, a manuductio, a gradual advancing, together, in confidence. Both Dante and St. Thomas were poets and philosophers, but most of all they were teachers, guides of souls; they can be our guides as we rediscover the vivifying principles of Catholic education. May we believe in charity, take the hand they offer, and receive from them a tradition of teaching able “to forge characters” in love with the good.
Endnotes
1 Translation of the Divine Comedy by Mark Musa (The Portable Dante, Penguin Books, 1995).
2 See Pope Benedict XV’s 1921 encyclical honoring Dante on the 600th anniversary of the poet’s death, In Praeclara Summorum: “Among the many celebrated geniuses of whom the Catholic faith can boast who have left undying fruits in literature and art especially and to whom civilization and religion are ever in debt, highest stands the name of Dante Alighieri. Dante lived in an age which inherited the most glorious fruits of philosophical and theological teaching and thought, and handed them on to the succeeding ages with the imprint of the strict scholastic method. Amid the various currents of thought diffused then too among learned men Dante ranged himself as disciple of that Prince of the school so distinguished for his angelic temper of intellect, Saint Thomas Aquinas. From him he gained nearly all his philosophical and theological knowledge, and while he did not neglect any branch of human learning, at the same time he drank deeply at the founts of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers.”
3 Third Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Solesmes and former professor of Thomistic theology. Retraite avec Dom Delatte, Solesmes, 1991, pp. 56-57.
4 Psalm 18:2, Psalm 146:4.
5 The Mass of St. Pius V, STAS Editions, 2010, p. 57.
6 Pius XII, Allocution to Italian Mothers, October 26, 1941.
7 Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate, q. 1, a. 1, sc.
8 On the Teacher, De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1.
9 May 1953. Mother Hélène was Superior General of the Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus of Toulouse.
10 On the Teacher, De Veritate, q. 11, a. 1.
11 On Providence, De Veritate, q. 5, a. 8.
12 Le Mariage, Carnet spirituel 1, Association du R.P. de Chivré, June 2004, p. 28.
13 Theologian of Archbishop Lefebvre at Vatican II, Dominican tertiary, founder of the Dominican Sisters of the Holy Ghost, in Réflexions sur l’éducation.
14 Letter of December 28, 1934, in Notre Dame de Joie, Nouvelles Editions Latines, 1973.
15 Ecole chrétienne renouvelée, Téqui, 1958, p. 63. Fr. Roger-Thomas Calmel was a friend of Archbishop Lefebvre and chaplain of the Dominican Teaching Sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus of Toulouse.
16 “L’Education par le grégorien,” in Itinéraires 246, Sept.-Oct. 1980.