Dante the Theologian / Denys Turner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Turner, Denys, 1942- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321--Criticism and interpretation.

Dante Alighieri.

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321--Religion.

Theology in literature.

Religion in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xx, 299 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Summary:

An understanding of Dante the theologian as distinct from Dante the poet has been neglected in an appreciation of Dante's work as a whole. That is the starting-point of this vital new book. In giving theology fresh centrality, the author argues that theologians themselves should find, when they turn to Dante Alighieri, a compelling resource: whether they do so as historians of fourteenth-century Christian thought, or as interpreters of the religious issues of our own times. Expertly guiding his readers through the structure and content of the Commedia, Denys Turner reveals - in pacy and muscular prose - how Dante's aim for his masterpiece is to effect what it signifies. It is this quasi-sacramental character that renders it above all a theological treatise: whose meaning is intelligible only through poetry. Turner's Dante 'knows that both poetry and theology are necessary to the essential task and that each without the other is deficient.'

Contents:

Cover

Half-title page

Reviews

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1 Theology and Poetry

Dante, Theologian by Way of Poetry

Poetry by Way of Theology

Part I Hell

2 Hell: Dante and Aquinas

Dante's Choice

Why Must Dante Enter Hell?

Sin's World

Dante's Journey through Hell Is His Purgatory

The Infernal Self-Knowledge

Hell As a Place

What to Make of Hell: Aquinas

3 Inferno as Anti-narrative

Is This True?

Truth by Way of Counterfactual Fictions

Anti-narratives

Satan

Absolute Evil

Postlude: Is Aquinas Inconsistent?

Part II Purgatory

4 Purgatory and Purgation

Choice

Augustine and Life's Story

Conversion

Augustine and Dante at the Point of Conversion

Akrasia, and Telling the Story of Conversion on Your Terms

Conversion of the Will

Beatrice's Challenge

5 Hope, Memory, and the Earthly Paradise

The Conversion of Memory

Self-Knowledge as Repentance

Purgatory and Learning How to Remember Well

Beatrice's Anger

The Purgatory's Supererogatory

The Waters of Lethe and the Fomes Peccati

Remembering a "First" Self

The Priority of Grace

Part III Paradise

6 Paradise and Paideia

On Poetry, Ecstasy, and How to Get Language to Fail

A Paradisal Politics

Paradise as Mystical Community

Three Silences

7 Paradise and the End of Poetry

Hell and Paradise

The Two Eternities

Silence Imagined

Poetry's End

The Demotic Celestial: Smiles

Eternal Life

The Right Way to Fail

Select Bibliography

Dante's Works

Commentaries on Dante

Other Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 07 Sep 2022).

ISBN:

9781009203401

1009203401

9781009203395

1009203398

9781009168687

1009168681

OCLC:

1492964349