Peter S. Hawkins

Dante and the Bible

Underwriting the entire world in which Dante lived is a single book, the Bible. Believed to be authored by a God who chose human scribes to speak his word, it had an authority quite beyond any other text. For this reason it was the most studied book in the Middle Ages, both the primer on which the young clerk learned his alphabet, and the “sacred page” that dominated every branch of higher learning. Not that the power of the Scriptures was limited to school or to the literate. As the holy book of the church, it not only informed liturgy and preaching, art and architecture, but also constituted a vast and complex symbolic network that was intelligible, on whatever level, to all classes of society. Far more than Latin, the Bible itself was the universal “language” of Christian culture. It is not surprising, then, that when Dantes writings are considered as a whole, the Christian Scriptures should be the source of more reference and allusion than any other work: by one count there are 575 citations of the Bible in Dante, compared with 395 to Aristotle and 192 to Virgil. Calculations of this sort, however, do not suggest the degree to which Dante absorbed the world of the Bible. This is most notably true in the Commedia , where the Old and New Testaments, both in Latin and in vernacular translation, so permeate his language as almost to become one with it. Sometimes the poet will quote the Bible or openly draw attention to its relevance; far more often, however, he will allow its presence to go unannounced, relying on the reader to catch the biblical resonance and make something of it.

All Smiles: Poetry and Theology in Dante

The greatest master of the “Gothic smile” was not one of the anonymous visual artists who made saints and angels beam in the mid–thirteenth century; rather, it was Dante. Smiling is the hallmark of the presumably “sage and serious” poet and a sign of his distinctive originality as a Christian theologian. While this is true as early as La vita nuova and the Convivio, the Commedia shows how Dante journeys toward the beatific vision of God through the smile (on the faces of Vergil, Beatrice, and others). Sorriso/sorridere and riso/ridere—as noun or verb, and apparently interchangeable in meaning—appear over seventy times in the poem, in a wide variety of contexts: twice in Inferno, on more than twenty occasions in Purgatory, and double that number in Paradiso. As he develops the poem, Dante uses the smile to express the unique individuality not only of the human being but also of the triune God. (PSH)