Denys Turner's new book reads Dante's Comedy as a work of theology: not simply a poem with theological content, but a work in which theology is done as poetry, and poetic language becomes the most appropriate means of conveying theological truth. Dante, Turner argues, wrote the Comedy ‘simply for truth's sake – for truth's sake you write theology because there is something that needs saying that calls for it, and you write poetry because that is the only way truthfully to say it’ (p. 1). Building on recent work that recognises medieval women religious as theologians (e.g. Caroline Walker Bynum's work on medieval women religious, and Turner's earlier work on Julian of Norwich), Turner makes the case for a ‘wholesale revision of what counts as theology in the Middle Ages’ (p. xiii), a revision that invites us to rethink the methods and very nature of theology. Turner likewise shows that Dante has significant contributions to make to twenty-first-century theological debates. The book is rich, lucid and insightful, cutting across disciplinary boundaries and offering much not only to those working in theology, but also to those working in Dante studies, literary studies and medieval studies.
The first chapter frames the book as a whole and offers important reflections on theology as poetry, and on the relation between fiction and truth – the ways in which Dante's narrative fiction of a journey through the three realms of the Christian afterlife can, precisely because it is fiction, get at theological truth. The chapter likewise examines the possibility and implications of expanding what is defined as theology and of treating Dante ‘as belonging within the family of theologians though he is no Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure’ (p. 15).
The rest of the book is divided into three parts, each made up of a pair of chapters. Part I, ‘Hell’ (chapters 2 and 3), explores Dante's Inferno, including the self-entrapped condition of those in Inferno; the nature of Dante's journey through hell as being purgatorial (he travels through it rather than remaining in it eternally); the question of whether there is a state of eternal punishment and, particularly, the question – if there is no such state, is there still theological value to be found in Inferno? Turner argues for reading Inferno as an anti-narrative, a narrative that ‘describes a state of affairs that is at once impossible and revealing’ (p. 92). Hell as Dante describes it cannot exist, yet Inferno is a necessary fiction, revealing truths about the psychology of evil and the social world that an evil will creates.
Part II, ‘Purgatory’ (chapters 4 and 5), turns to Purgatorio, the second cantica of the Comedy, and investigates Dante's conception of free choice, grace, original sin and the nature of conversion. Reading Dante alongside Augustine's conversion story in Confessions, Turner explores the difference between moral reform and a more radical ‘conversion … of understanding’ (p. 187); the role of grace in conversion and its paradoxical relation to freedom (the two joined in a ‘causal mutuality’: ‘grace … caus[ing] the freedom through which alone it works’, p. 198); and the relation between conversion and narrative – how conversion entails a reinterpretation of the events that came before it, a rewriting of the story.
Part III, ‘Paradise’ (chapters 6 and 7), moves to the last cantica of the Comedy and examines, among other concerns, conceptions of the mystical; the difference between the eternity of hell and that of paradise; and types of silence and their relation to language. Turner argues that paradise is a ‘place of learning’ (p. 259), though this is not a learning that happens through striving or repentance or desire for something lacking, nor is it a learning that could ever fail. This learning ‘is not hard means to a joy separately defined, for the joy is in the learning itself’ (p. 274); it happens, for example, through and as smiles. Turner offers here a particularly beautiful reflection on smiles, music, communication and love.
This summary, of course, has not done justice to the variety and richness of Turner's arguments. The book is illuminating and thought-provoking, and, particularly in its treatment of the interrelation of poetry and theology, is a significant contribution to debates in both Dante studies and theology.
