Dante, Desire, and the Epic Quest: Part Three
Synderesis in Dante’s Itinerarium
Thank you for indulging this three-part descent into nerdery. Sometimes my inner nerd rears his ugly head—but never fear: this is the final installment on Dante and desire after which I will return my attention to poetry, education, and fitness.
This first part considered Dante’s Commedia as a work of quest literature with the hero driven forward by desire.
Part three argues that Bonaventure’s understanding of synderesis is at the heart of Dante’s Commedia and that desire is the key to Dante’s poetic structure and vision of sanctification.
Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis represents the form of epic quest distilled to its barest essentials: an anatomy of synderesis. Furthermore, it alerted Dante to the possibility that his poetry might take the form of an epic quest by building a bridge between worlds. In its structure, the trajectory of the Commedia is a quest undertaken by an individual soul moving toward God and recapitulates Bonaventure’s form of an itinerarium. But as we will see, it is also Bonaventure’s concept of synderesis that animates the Commedia.
Edward Hagman’s essay “Dante’s Vision of God: The End of the Itinerarium Mentis” argues that Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis is a decisive influence on Dante, but he locates the influence chiefly in the structural consonance and final imagery in both works—their shared apophatic apperception of God—rather than in the activity of synderesis. Hagman’s points are invaluable to a Bonaventurian reading of Dante, but can be strengthened by a focus on synderesis. It is synderesis in particular that extends Bonaventure’s reach throughout the Commedia, rather than limiting his thought to the role of a helpful gloss on Dante’s version of the beatific vision.
In Bonaventure, synderesis is not limited to beatified souls in the act of perceiving God. To be sure, as an anatomy of synderesis, the Itinerarium Mentis has much to tell us about lost souls—a fact not lost on Dante for whom the Itinerarium Mentis proved an influence even in the Inferno.
Perhaps counterintuitively, Bonaventure writes in the Commentary on the Sentences that synderesis is at its most active in hell where, since synderesis itself cannot be corrupted, it exists as an inflamed desire for God that is permanently frustrated and a tremendous source of guilt:
[synderesis] has another use, namely, to murmur in reply [to evil]. In this use, in which the function of synderesis is to sting and murmur in reply to evil, it will flourish most in the damned. (emphasis mine) I say this, in the sense in which murmuring in reply to evil is a punishment, not in the sense in which it is a matter of justice…. Hence, in the damned, synderesis murmurs in reply to their guilt, yet in relation to punishment.
So synderesis is actually a chief source of the torment in hell since it provides the foil of goodness to the reality of the lost soul’s experience in hell. How bad could the punishment really be if one was ignorant of the fact that one was being punished, and punished for doing something wrong? These are realizations only made possible and potent by the knowledge of, and desire for, the good.
Dante demonstrates this self-hate and frustration of the damned throughout the Inferno, but most acutely in the figure of Satan himself who represents the punishing contradiction of knowing one’s guilt and the pain caused by it, but remaining unwilling and unable to choose anything else. Satan is trapped in ice, beating his wings to escape, and all the while the wind from his wings is the source of the terrible temperature that freezes him in place. His desire for the good is both impossible and irrepressible. It is desire that instigates the frantic attempts to free himself that are so much the source of his punishment.
Indeed, for better or for worse, desire is the dominant mode of expression for synderesis. In Paradiso XXII Dante emphasizes this point when St. Benedict assures Dante:
Brother, your lofty wish shall find fulfillment in the highest sphere, where all desires are fulfilled, and mine as well. There only all we long for is perfected, ripe, and entire. It is there alone each element remains forever in its place. (Par, XXII.61-66)
Benedict knows well the feeling of desire for God that is the activity of synderesis in a soul. He tells Dante that only in apprehending God Himself can the itinerarium prompted and fueled by synderesis come to rest. This is why Benedict’s description of heaven has to include a form of stasis—perhaps surprisingly given the movement that has defined heaven until now—but stasis nonetheless where, “each element remains forever in its place.” And if remaining perpetually in place strikes us as somewhat unattractive, perhaps we have more in common with Ulysses, the perpetual wanderer, than with St. Benedict?
Ulysses, unfortunately for us, is doomed to hell, where synderesis keeps him on the move just as it did in life, with the exception that for Ulysses in hell, the perpetual itinerarium is now one of punishment and guilt. It holds no hope of finding or achieving the rest and stasis that he shunned so catastrophically in life.
It is this central theme of itinerarium, instigated as we have seen by synderesis, that compels Dante to feature Ulysses and Ulyssean themes throughout the entire Commedia, where, in Paradiso for example, Adam’s original sin (and punishment) is identical to Ulysses’. “Know then, my son, that in itself the tasting of the tree / was not the cause of such long exile— / it lay in trespassing the boundary line” (Par, XXVI.115-117). Ulysses, in the same canto of the Inferno, describes his destruction as due to having crossed beyond “where Hercules marked off the limits / warning all men to go no farther” (Inf, XXVI.108-109).
It has been noted in various commentaries that Dante the pilgrim bears an uncomfortable likeness to the lost hero from Ithaca, and the nostos-driven structure of the Commedia is not so dissimilar from the nostos of the Odyssey. But to what end does Dante sustain the consonance between his Commedia and the Ulyssean myth, between Dante the pilgrim and Ulysses the lost soul? For one, the Ulysses myth is the archetypal gold-standard of the itinerarium and nostos topos—it is an influence too universal and compelling for Dante to leave behind. It is also the case that the representation of Ulysses in hell, and his contrast with Dante, produces a rich pathos across the three canticas. But most importantly, and related to these first two is not the contrast between Dante and Ulysses, but the fundamental likeness in their power of synderesis. We see that both heroes are wanderers, both spurred onward by a nearly irrepressible desire, and both pursue a trajectory in the Commedia that is best defined by synderesis. Ulysses’ synderesis is forever unfulfilled, just as in his life. But as Bonaventure indicates, it is likely that he experiences synderesis most acutely here in hell. On the other hand, Dante’s synderesis, counterintuitively achieves a certain stasis in Paradiso’s final canto.
Dante’s stasis is counterintuitive because synderesis is the force responsible for propelling the soul toward the good and it manifests itself in movement. Dante repeatedly describes the force of desire moving him through both Purgatorio and Paradiso. In canto III of the Purgatorio we hear the urgency of desire when our pilgrims ask for directions: “tell us where the mountain rises gently / so that we may begin the long ascent. / The more we know, the more we hate time’s waste” (Pur, III.76-78), then later, “a thousand desires hotter than any flame / bound my eyes to those shining eyes” (Pur, XXXI.118-119), or finally, “my soul, filled with wonder and with joy, / tasted the food that, satisfying in itself, / yet for itself creates a greater craving” (Pur, XXXI.127-129).
Almost every canto contains this kind of indication of the affective movement toward God. To hear the similarity with Bonaventure it might be helpful to revisit the Itinerarium Mentis where he exhorts the pilgrim soul to “ask grace, not learning; desire, not understanding; the groaning of prayer, not diligence in reading; the Bridegroom, not the teacher” (IM, 39).
This brings us to the final scenes of the Paradiso, in which the role and representation of desire intensifies. Canto XXVI presents desire in what the prudish might consider an inappropriately carnal tone as Dante converses with John the Evangelist and prepares to meet Adam the original man. We encounter a divine erotics where John describes Dante as “consumed on me” (Par, XXVI.5), then Dante figures Beatrice as having “entered” (Par, XXVI.15) him with fire before he figures divine authority as having “imprinted” (Par, XXVI.27) him with love. A few lines later John challenges Dante to “declare / the many teeth with which this love does bite” (Par, XXVI.50-51). It is a remarkably physical canto, and appropriately so as it features John who himself wrote the lines the “Word was made flesh” (1:14).
John, “the beloved disciple,” an embodiment of the affective, is known as the most mystical of the Gospel writers, but also as someone with a unique insistence on the physical. Dante captures this twin emphasis in John reminding us that the carnal and mystical are always closely associated, as in the Eucharist where the closest contact with God on earth is through the carnal process of “entering,” “biting,” and “consumption.” Eating and erotics have this in common: they enact and achieve union with the object of desire. Recalling Bonaventure’s insistence that synderesis is the “unitive drive” and our “highest power” makes sense of this surge in physical language and intensification of desire at the upper reaches of heaven.
But finally, unlike his foil Ulysses, Dante’s desire comes to rest. It is the Cistercian mystic, Saint Bernard, that comes “to lead [Dante’s] longing to its goal” (Par, XXXI.65), a termination of the journey apparently contrary to the the instigative properties of synderesis. In canto XXXIII Dante writes “all my mind, absorbed, / was gazing, fixed, unmoving and intent, / becoming more enraptured in its gazing” (Par, XXXIII.97-99). Dante’s itinerarium is at an end and our final view of him involves an immersion of the desiring self in the object of its desire: “Here my exalted vision lost its power. / But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving / with an even motion, were turning with / the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars” (Par, XXXIII.143-145)
How can Dante be “fixed” and “unmoving” while his will and desire turn “with the Love that moves the sun?” It appears that he is motionless in relation to God because he is moving in perfect union with him. It is satisfying to see that banner of synderesis, desire, still unfurled in the final lines of the poem, where true to the mystical insistence of Bonaventure and now Bernard, desire is what ties us to Him, “the fire that wholly inflames and carries one into God through transporting unctions and consuming affections. God Himself is this fire” (IM, 39).
many thanks for the great read