Dante, Desire, and the Epic Quest
Part 1 of 3: Dante’s Commedia as Itinerarium Mentis
This is part 1 of a 3 part series on Dante and desire. This first part considers Dante’s Commedia as a work of quest literature with the hero driven forward by desire.
Part 2 will explore the concept of “synderesis” in Bonaventure—synderesis an almost erotic spark at “the summit of the mind.”
Part 3 will argue 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.
“A quest,” writes Robert Segal, “[is] a literal journey from home to a new world and then back.”1 Quests have that in common with pilgrimages such as the one that Dante undertakes in his Commedia. The hero, or the pilgrim, undertakes a journey with the purpose of achieving some object: a grail perhaps, or an esoteric knowledge. Sometimes, as in the Odyssey, it seems that simply home itself is the object of the quest. Often quest literature signifies on both interior and exterior planes so that a physical journey connotes an interior conversion, thereby literalizing the religious practice of the pilgrimage.
It is no accident that in the nineteenth century, literary analysis benefited from the attention of psychologists like Freud and Jung who theorized this interiority of the quest tradition in literature. For example, the Jungian Joseph Campbell writes that “the physical journey is meant as a metaphor for the mental journey.” The quest topos makes evident the mixing and cross-pollination of interior and exterior experience that is so central to modern psychological practice and that has been a mainstay of religious life for millennia.
But in both the physical and mental representations of quests or pilgrimages, the nostos, or homecoming, is a defining moment. Our word “nostalgia” emphasizes the stakes of the nostos which in the Greek is “a return home,” while “algia” signifies “pain.” “Nostalgia” might have a pejorative or dismissive connotation in some contemporary usage, but in literature, the “algia” of the “nostos,” that intense desire for a home—as seen in Homer’s Odysseus, Virgil’s Aeneas, Milton’s Satan, and Joyce’s Bloom—and the pain that such desire entails, is the source of tremendous pathos. So quests and pilgrimages have that in common too: the pain and promise of desire.
So quests and pilgrimages have that in common too: the pain and promise of desire.
Many of the most enduring works of literature feature the quest or pilgrimage trajectory which includes the twin tropes of the journey and the nostos. In the East, the Bhagavad Gita entails a journey into battle with the nostos occurring as a form of enlightenment. In the West, Homer’s Odyssey depicts an ageing warrior’s journey home and culminates in the purging of his household and reunion with his family. The Parzival Legend, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Dante’s Commedia all participate in the form of quest and nostos and lend themselves to readings that include the psychologization and spiritualization of the journey and homecoming.
The Commedia is of interest here not necessarily because it is an ideal representative of the quest trope, but because it follows and expands a slightly different model of the quest that was developed and implemented by Christians in the Middle Ages. Specifically, St. Bonaventure’s work of mystical theology, the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, exemplifies a theological quest narrative that is a clear antecedent for Dante’s ambitiously Christianized epic quest.
Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis manages to be simultaneously a work of theology and a mystical masterpiece. In its theology, the Itinerarium Mentis is quintessentially Franciscan. With writing that is highly structured and methodical, Bonaventure deemphasizes the role of the intellect in the soul’s pilgrimage, accenting instead affect and desire as the keys to propelling the soul toward God.
It is possible to misread the contrast between the Franciscan emphasis on affect and, say, a Dominican or Scholastic emphasis on intellect—as we will see, it is a controversy that Dante addresses explicitly in Paradiso—but as the historian of monastic culture Jean Leclercq warns “[l]et us note carefully that the monastic and the scholastic milieux are not in constant opposition; they form a contrast but are also interrelated and they owe much to each other.”2 As a book of mysticism the Itinerarium Mentis moves through levels of human consciousness arriving in a final, powerful, apophatic passage at the consideration of union with God. “Let us, then, die and enter into this darkness. Let us silence all our cares, our desires, and our imaginings” (IM, 39). Here the text is at its most mystical, lapsing into self-effacing prayer and then the language of scripture as the only alternatives to silence before the face of God.
It might be misleading to describe Bonaventure’s small book as exhibiting a narrative arc since there are no characters and its form is that of a theological tract, but as early as the title, which in some translations appears as The Journey of the Mind to God, Bonaventure’s tract claims for itself a place in the corpus of quest literature. In fact, the Itinerarium Mentis is almost an inevitable expression of the figural quest that is latent in Christianity’s eschatological framework and is recapitulated at every level of Christian life.
On the one hand, from the largest perspective of Church history, a person’s principal home is that of a prelapsarian state of natural union with God. The journey is the fall from Eden through all of history, and the nostos will be the second coming at the end of time and human reunion with God. On the other hand, the most acute view of the Christian quest is that which occurs in every human soul. The journey entails a person’s conception in original sin and subsequent pilgrimage to God, where, as in Bonaventure, one crosses borders in an ascent to to what “is eternal, most spiritual, and above us,” (IM, 6) a traverse that occurs over the course of a lifetime. It is ultimately in capturing this structure that the Itinerarium Mentis, the individual soul’s journey, converts the quest topos to a Christian arch-myth.
For Bonaventure’s mystical itinerary, the borders and boundary lines are of chief importance, representing and pre-figuring in each individual transition the final boundary to be crossed in achieving union with God. Bonaventure employs the figure of a ladder and pressures the liminal states and transitions between each rung of ascent. The drama of the Itinerarium Mentis plays out in the soul’s passage through these liminal states where the natural gives way to the intellectual, then finally to the spiritual, or alternately, the temporal transitions to the sempiternal, then lastly to the eternal.
No, it is not the rip-roaring adventure of Homer’s pre-Christian epics, but for the Christian, it enacts with mystical intensity the drama of the spiritual life, often figured as spiritual warfare, in a quest narrative whose intensity is chiefly interior. Bonaventure’s final passages of the Itinerarium Mentis achieve a dramatic pitch worthy of a Christian quest-epic.
And you my friend, in this matter of mystical visions, renew your journey, ‘abandon the senses, intellectual activities, and all visible and invisible things—everything that is not and everything that is—and oblivious of yourself, let yourself be brought back, in so far as it is possible, to union with Him Who is above all essence and all knowledge. And transcending yourself and all things, ascend to the superessential gleam of the divine darkness by an incommensurable and absolute transport of pure mind.’ (IM, 39)
The conclusion to Bonaventure’s itinerarium recapitulates the entire trajectory of the traditional quest narrative with the significant innovation of an explicitly interior experience.
The Itinerarium Mentis gives us a sense of the field into which the ambitious and orthodox Christian poet Dante entered—and Dante was almost certainly familiar with Bonaventure’s book. As early as his forerunner to the Commedia, The Vita Nuova, we can see Dante considering the spiritual trajectory of an individual soul in the Christian metaphysical schema.
The Vita Nuova records Dante’s conversion to the love of an allegorically invested woman named Beatrice. This is the same Beatrice that figures so prominently in the Comedia, but even in the Vita Nuova she presides over Dante’s interior journey. Dante describes feeling “like one who does not know what direction to take, who wants to start but does not know which way to go” (VN 13.6). This searching beginning is Dante’s first attempt at figuring the Christian soul confronted with divine love as undertaking a journey or itinerarium.
The language of itinerarium regularly punctuates the Vita Nuova as when Dante describes his experience of love with I have placed my feet on those boundaries of life beyond which no one can go further and hope to return” (VN 26.8), or as Dante writes in a gloss of the final sonnet of the book, “[t]he new sonnet I wrote begins ‘Beyond the sphere’.... and I call it a ‘pilgrim spirit’ because it makes the journey up there spiritually and once there it is like a pilgrim far from home” (VN 82.5).
It is important to recognize Dante’s preliminary translation here of the quest topos into a Christian itinerarium mentis. This quest is spiritual, involves the passage of boundaries, and culminates in a home that involves complete satiety in the gaze of the divine beloved. “[M]ay it please that One who is the Lord of Graciousness that my soul ascent to behold the glory of its lady,” (VN 84.3) is one of the final lines in the book and marks the expected nostos of the Vita Nuova.
But even more than the Vita Nuova, Dante’s Commedia signals the influence of Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis. As a type of the supernatural quest or itinerarium topos, Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis sets a standard, perhaps even establishes an expectation, for a Christian epic like Dante’s in which the traditional quest narrative is theologized and made applicable to a Christian cosmology. Indeed, Dante’s Commedia as a figural rendering of Christian cosmology has proven powerful enough to dominate the Christian imagination of the afterlife ever since he wrote it.
For Dante, Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis exerts influence on both form and theology. Regarding form, the quest, pilgrimage, and itinerarium figures are rewritten as a Christian conversion story, a journey of the soul, that comprises the core of Dante’s narrative and is shaped throughout each cantica by recurring imagery of roads, trials, and travel.
Consider Canto 23 in each of the three canticas. In Inferno 23, Dante and Virgil are fleeing from the Malacoda “as Friars Minor walk along the roads” (Inf. 23.3). When the pursuing devils approach, the pilgrims cross the border from one boglia to the next, saving themselves by traversing a boundary that the devils cannot cross. In Purgatorio 23, Dante approaches a group of souls “Just as pilgrims… / overtaking strangers on the road,” (Pur. 23.16-17) and later in the canto we hear of Forese Donati’s earthly death and subsequent progress through purgatory as instances of the border and boundary crossing that are inherent in an itinerarium. Finally, in Paradiso XXIII, Christ is figured as something like a spiritual construction crew that “repaired / the roads connecting Heaven and the earth” (Par. 23.38). A bit later the border crossing appears again as “the sacred poem must make its leap across, / as does a man who finds his path cut off” (Par. 23.62-63).
The point is probably all too clear since it is a fundamental structural scheme of the Commedia, but it is nevertheless important to register this form in the poem especially as we bring it into contact with Dante’s theology. It is at the intersection of Dante’s form and theology that the resemblance to Bonaventure and Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis is most acute. In fact, it is predominantly one element of Bonaventure’s theology that enacts his greatest influence on Dante: synderesis.
This is part one of a three part series on Dante.
Robert Segal, “On the Hero’s Quest,” in The Hero’s Quest, ed. Bernard Schweizer and Robert Segal (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2013).
Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).