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Vittorio Montemaggi on Dante's "Commedia" (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) January 27, 2023: As an undergraduate English major at Saint Louis University (class of '66), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), I read the St. Louis-born-and-raised Nobel-Prize winning poet (in 1948) and distinguished literary critic T. S. Eliot's 1957 essay collection On Poetry and Poets (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy), which includes his 1951 essay "Virgil and the Christian World" (pp. 135-148) in the fall semester of 1964. I read Eliot's 1957 essay collection for the course Practical Criticism: Poetry that I took that semester at SLU from the Kansas-City-born-and-raised Missouri Province Jesuit Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).

Eliot's 1951 essay "Virgil and the Christian World" is also now reprinted in volume seven of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: 1947-1953, edited by Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard (Johns Hopkins University Press; Faber and Faber, 2021, pp. 627-640), which is the version that I will quote here.

For a briefly annotated bibliography of Ong's 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations and reprinting as distinct publications), see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the 2011 book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (Hampton Press, pp. 185-245).

For a discussion of Ong's philosophical thought, see my OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):

Click Here

Now, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the Holocaust, and President Harry Truman's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific events in the twentieth century. The aging Eliot (1888-1965) wrote his 1951 essay in the midst of the emerging Cold War era.

Among other things, Eliot says, "The term which one can justifiably regret the lack of in Virgil is amore. It is, above all others, the key word for Dante" (p. 636). "Virgil was, among all the authors of classical antiquity, one for whom the world made sense, for whom it had order and dignity, and for whom, as for no one before his time except the Hebrew prophets, history had meaning. But he was denied the vision of the man who could say: 'Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe'" (pp. 636-637; the editors inform us that Eliot is here quoting the Temple Classics translation of Dante's Paradiso XXXIII.85-87).

So what exactly is the vision of love that Dante the poet explores in his famous autobiographical poem about his mid-life crisis - in two parts of which poem a character named Virgil serves as the guide for the character named Dante (in the third part, the character named Beatrice appears as the character Dante's new guide)?

The Italian-born Cambridge-University-educated Dante specialist Vittorio Montemaggi, now at King's College London, explores Dante's vision of love in his 2016 partly autobiographical book Reading Dante's "Commedia" as Theology: Divinity Realized in Human Encounter (Oxford University Press). Because Montemaggi taught at the University of Notre Dame when he wrote and published this 2016 book, a certain amount of his autobiographical material in the book contains references to it (for specific page references to it, see the "Index" entry for it under "N" [p. 297]).

In the "Bibliography" (pp. 269-286), Montemaggi does not happen to include Eliot's 1951 essay "Virgil and the Christian World" or his 1957 essay collection Of Poetry and Poet - or any references to Ong's work. In the "Bibliography" (p. 281), Montemaggi lists under "P" seven entries that he begins with the title "Pope" - the first by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, followed by five separate entries for Pope Francis, and then an entry for a work co-authored by Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Under "S" Montemaggi lists Saint John XXIII (p. 282).

Now, I was most surprised by Montemaggi's references, in his footnotes, to three popes: (1) Pope John XXIII (p. 88n91); (2) the late Pope Benedict XVI (p. 107n29); and (3) Pope Francis (pp. 88n91; 107-108n29; 135n69; 145n83; and 177n36). Pope Francis has encouraged practicing Catholics to engage in what he refers to as encounters, and the term "Encounter" appears in Montemaggi's subtitle and in various contexts throughout his book (for specific page references, see the "Index" entry on encounter, human [pp. 291-292]).

For further discussion of the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis, see my OEN article "Pope Francis on Evil and Satan" (dated March 24, 2019):

Click Here

Now, the autobiographical parts of Montemaggi's 2016 book often involve recognizing and acknowledging his debts to others who have helped him formulate and express his own thoughts. Even though those parts are a bit unconventional in the way he expresses them in his scholarly book, make no mistake about it - his scholarly book is written by a Dante specialist, primarily about Dante's famous poem, but in large measure about other Dante specialists' views, and primarily for Dante specialists.

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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