Dante and Praying with the Saints

    Reading from The Golden Legend,  St. Bonaventure on St. Francis, and St. Anselm’s prayers to the saints got me thinking about Dante this week. Dante was not just the author of the Inferno, but the poet of a journey that leads all the way to Paradise. In his account of that journey there is not simply narrative, but song, thought, and prayer. The gateway, so to speak, to the peak of his journey is mediated by saints. I think we might learn something from the way of addressing the saints presented by Dante, a man among the most passionate and thoughtful of his Medieval contemporaries and teachers and extraordinary among them for felicity of expression, especially considering that the saints most important to Dante are among the most important for our studies of Christian Medieval mythology. 

   

    Dante’s paradise has several layers and Dante encounters the blessed in everyone one besides the first. That of which I think today is that in which Dante describes the souls of the Blessed Wise: the Heaven of the Sun. Dante names more of the blessed in this Heaven in more than any other: twelve in its first circle and again twelve in its second. The main speaker of the first is St. Thomas Aquinas, while in the second it is St. Bonaventure. St. Thomas, the Dominican, eulogizes St. Francis, while St. Bonaventure, the Franciscan, eulogizes St. Dominic. This interlocking and parallel structure suggests that Dante had considered one of the perennial perplexities of the saints: here on Earth, the saints were divided and even disagreed with each other, while in paradise they stand together. Dante guides us to consider our relationship with the saints in view of this perplexing fact. It is all the more emphasized as follows: St. Thomas stands next to Sigier of Brabant and St. Bonaventure next to Joachim of Flora: both in earthly life attacked the views of their eventual heavenly companions. 

    Reading St. Thomas’s and St. Bonaventure’s eulogies of St. Francis and St. Dominic respectively helps cast some light on this situation. St. Thomas’s eulogy of St. Francis describes the events and significance of his life in the strongest terms and in a way agreeing with St. Bonaventure’s Life of St. Francis. He goes from his “guerra del padre” (his fight against his father) to his reception of “l’ultimo sigillo” (the final seal, the stigmata). St. Thomas’s highest and most constant praise of St. Francis, however, is an anagogic symbol: St. Francis is like the Sun of the Heaven of the Sun, he is always rising to God as God took him up directly to paradise at his death. St. Bonaventure’s eulogy of St. Dominic, on the other hand, is of course different from St. Thomas’s of St. Francis insofar as their lives were different. The governing anagogic symbol here is not an ever-rising Sun, but an ever-maintained garden: the life of St. Dominic was a constant fighting against the “mondo errante” (the errant world) as a gardener fights that which would hold his plants back. The lives of the saints were different, so their symbols are different: but, by the same consideration, we see that their motions, their ultimate ends, are the same. The Sun is rising, the plants are growing. Both St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure end their speeches by transitioning to the subjects of the other, which as a Dominican and a Franciscan respectively, we would have expected to be their subjects all along. But no: in Paradise love of one’s own comes after love of the other. The love of God to which all the different saints aspired is the first and unifying thing.    

The lesson to take from Dante’s invocation of the saints in the Heaven of the Sun seems to me to be similar to the lesson Prof. Fulton Brown adduced from St. Anselm’s prayers to the saints. Saints and believers, despite the peculiar differences between their struggles and ways of living, feel for each other's yearning for the grace of God. This yearning crosses worldly lines: the Dominican St. Thomas may eulogize St. Francis and the Franciscan St. Bonaventure may eulogize St. Dominic, St. Thomas may stand next to Sigier of Brabant and St. Bonaventure next to Joachim of Flora. Difference, in Paradise, points to God. Even more: just as the extreme of St. Anselm’s empathy for the saints points to Mary Magdalene, Dante’s invocations of the saints in the Heaven of the Sun must be taken in view of his ultimate connection to his lady Beatrice. Both St. Anselm’s and Dante evince a profound respect for men like them, and all the more so in the differences among them, but save a particularly high place for women unlike them. This difference for both men led to a more immediate connection to God.

-LB