An Evolutionary Look at a Classic Work
A Review of
Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography
Joseph Luzzi
Hardcover: Princeton UP, 2024
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Reviewed by Todd Edmondson
This volume by Joseph Luzzi is the latest in a series from Princeton University Press that is rooted in a simple but powerful premise: great books, perhaps especially great religious books, have a life of their own, a history of reception, rejection, reinterpretation and rediscovery that can be as much a part of the book’s narrative as the words contained within its pages. This is a phenomenon with which most readers are familiar, albeit on a smaller scale. My first encounter with one of my favorite novels, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was a very different experience from when I revisited it more than twenty years later. Many readers will have similar stories to tell about beloved works like The Catcher in the Rye, Little Women, or The Great Gatsby. As we change, so too, do the books we love. When the work in question is the Book of Revelation, the Qur’an, Calvin’s Institutes, or some other book similarly fraught with religious significance, that process by which a book’s life might unfold in the imagination of the reader—or the collective imagination of a vast community of readers, spread through both time and space—is all the more pronounced.
For this installment, Luzzi turns his attention to one of the most intriguing and imaginative religious works of the last millennium, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Anyone who has read the Comedy knows that the work itself is an epic both elaborately constructed and intricately mapped out. Comparisons abound, but one of the most enduring analogies likens Dante’s masterpiece to a Gothic Cathedral, as the poet uses the vernacular Tuscan dialect of his Florence to craft a soaring narrative of pilgrimage and salvation that digs into the depths of darkest hell, depicting in gargoyle grotesquerie the consequences of human sin before reaching for the inexpressible light and life found in the highest heavens, in the very presence of the one whose love and grace ultimately triumphs over all. Dante, a complicated man in his own right, has left us a complicated work with a complicated legacy, all of which Luzzi explores in this compelling history of the epic’s creation and reception through the centuries.
As someone who has taught the Inferno (the first book in the Comedy’s tripartite structure that spans Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise), I have a yearly front-row seat to some of the ways that college freshmen engage this work. I also came to Luzzi’s work possessing some familiarity with how the poem came into existence, including some of the details surrounding Dante’s exile from Florence and the political and religious resentments he carried with him into that exile, all of which gave shape to the vivid, hostile, and at times darkly humorous verses. Luzzi examines much of this background in his treatment here, but also goes much further, sharing with readers the myriad and often conflicted conversations that readers of this poem, both opponents and advocates, have engaged in since its initial publication.
Among these opponents, unsurprisingly, were the church officials in power when Dante’s work was first circulated among readers. Popes, Cardinals, and Bishops who felt attacked by Dante’s poem—to be fair, they were attacked, in rather unsubtle fashion—rushed to censure the work, with one friar dubbing Dante himself a “demonic vessel” six years after the poet’s death. Luzzi’s attention to this episode in the Comedy’s reception goes a long way toward dislodging any misconceptions readers might have about the notion that great works were always considered great.
In addition to those who reviled the work, Luzzi also examines those who have revered the poem, and even those whose reception bordered on the apathetic. Subsequent chapters focus on Renaissance renderings of the poem and the poet by both literary and visual artists of the time, 19th-century interest from Romantic icons like the Shelleys and lesser known figures of the time like Henry Francis Cary and Germaine de Stael, and even Modernist appropriations and reinterpretations from voices like TS Eliot and James Joyce, as well as the “Lost Centuries,” in which Dante’s work went virtually untranslated, unpublished, and unnoticed by the general public.
Among the most interesting aspects of Luzzi’s work is the final chapter, entitled “Trigger Warnings and Papal Blessings,” which, more than anything serves to reveal just how complicated a book’s reception might be, putting to rest any idea that even a work as imposing as the Comedy is monolithic. In this chapter, Luzzi discusses more recent receptions of the work, and the resistance to Dante’s epic on the part of many who see it as problematic. In a culture where the poem is viewed by many quarters as Islamophobic, Homophobic, and allegedly mired in the sort of perspectives that are increasingly unwelcome on syllabi, no matter the work’s import or influence, the Comedy, says Luzzi, has found support from an unexpected source—the Catholic Church. The very institution that had been the most adamant in its opposition to Dante and his poem upon its publication can now be counted among its most full-throated advocates. In particular, Luzzi highlights Pope Francis’s praise for the work as timeless and for the poet as a paradigm of exile and pilgrimage, an artist whose life and work resonate with our own times in ways that we ignore to our detriment. And so, in the process of exploring this epic work, now more than 700 years old, Joseph Luzzi also invites readers to think about the ways that great literature can continually change, long after it is first put to paper. Maybe just as significantly, Luzzi invites us to think about the ways that we change as readers, as we journey together on our own pilgrimages toward God, toward light, and toward “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”
Todd Edmondson
Todd Edmondsonis a pastor at First Christian Church in Erwin, Tennessee, and Associate Professor of Humanities and Composition at Milligan University. He lives in East Tennessee with his wife, three kids, and a golden retriever.
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