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English
323/Religious Studies 316
Dante
Wendy Furman-Adams
Dante and the Resurrection of the body |
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"I believe in
the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the
communion of saints, . . . the resurrection of
the body, and the life everlasting." Amen.
(Apostles' Creed, sixth century)
I. Greek and Roman views of the Afterlife:
A. Homer's picture of the "blurred and
breathless dead" (Odyssey XI).
B. Plato's idea of the immortality of the soul (Phaedo):
The body is "composite and compounded" and thus
doomed to "split up into its component parts."
But the soul is "non-composite," and thus
imperishable. (Also, learning is a
"recollection" of lost ideas--which suggests the
pre-existence of the soul, an idea Jewish and
Christian thinkers reject.) Whether the soul's
immortality is "personal" is another matter. But
in any case, in Plato's dualistic concept, the
immortal soul is certainly not an embodied soul.
C. The Epicurean idea of the mortality of the
soul (Lucretius): the soul is not immaterial; it
is just made up of tinier, finer particles than
the body. When the "jar" of the body breaks, the
soul simply dissolves like air.
D. The Stoic idea (found in Virgil) of souls
endlessly recycled--but embodied only on earth
(Aeneid
VI).
II. Hebrew views of the Afterlife:
A. Monism as Mortalism: the person is a unified
entity, and cannot be separated into body and
soul. Yahweh is present even in Sheol (Psalm
139), but no one praises him there. All is
vanity (Ecclesiastes 12).
B. First explicit statement of a belief in a
resurrection of the dead (and the first instance
of prayer for the dead) comes in the
deuterocanonical Book of II Maccabees (after 134
B.C.E. and before 63 B.C.E.)--chapters 7 and 12.
C. In Jesus' time, the doctrine of the
resurrection of the dead is still controversial.
(See
Matthew 22.23 - 33.)
III. Christian Views:
A. Jesus' own resurrection generally seen as the
prototype for the resurrection of all who die
"in him." The resurrected Jesus appears and
disappears at will, but can eat (especially
fish) and can be seen and touched. (See Luke
24.13-43; John 20:1 - 26 and 21.1 - 14.) In Mark and
Luke, he ascends bodily into heaven after
appearing to his disciples several times. (See
Mark 16.19 and Luke 24.50 - 51.) In all four
gospels, much is made of his body--dead and
resurrected. But the gospels also suggest, at
other points, an independent immortality of the
soul.
B. Resurrection of the Body (I Corinthians
15)--two basic interpretations:
1. "Christian Mortalism": one "falls asleep"
until the last judgment (I Thessalonians
4.13 - 18); then is raised, body and soul
together, "to meet the Lord in the air." This is Milton's view, but somewhat a minority (and
generally radical Protestant) view, based on
reading the New Testament through an essentially
Judaic monism.
2. Body and soul are separated at death, with
the soul going immediately to an afterlife; then
souls are reunited with their bodies at the Last
Judgment (a blend of Greek afterlife and late
Jewish resurrection). This is Dante's view, and
the main one in Christian tradition--a balance
(as the New Testament and Christian Philosophy
typically are) of Greek and Judaic elements.
IV. A few thoughts on the meaning of the
doctrine for Dante:
As a number of post-modern critics have pointed
out, the meaning of remembering is to
re-member--to put something that has been
severed or lost back together. Literature is by
its very nature an act of re-membering, for
Memory (as Dante reminds us) is the Mother of
the Muses.
For Dante, as for Homer and Virgil, as well as
for Andreas Capellanus, the act of desiring, of
longing, of love is an act of "membering" the
beloved (of calling up in the mind each beloved
limb and expression).
Andreas says that as the lover meditates on the
beloved, he or she begins to "fashion" an image
in the mind. But that image invariably leads to
suffering because it is a shadow; the object can
never be fully or permanently known and, even if
she/he could be known fully, she/he is
ultimately subject to decay.
In The Odyssey, too, remembrance can awaken
desire but cannot fulfill it. The "blurred and
breathless" dead are "alive" in the longing
memory of the living, but can never again be
embraced. Thus memory becomes tragic (or at
least elegiac): the longing for what can never
again be held.
In The Aeneid, the act of membering takes on an
element of futurity, as Anchises calls up Roman
history as prophecy. But Augustus' young nephew
is mourned in advance--before he even takes on
the body he will wear. Again, only the desire
remains--"although it be useless."
Near the end of the Vita Nuova, after Beatrice's
death and a great "period of distress," Dante is
inspired by a group of pilgrims to begin his own
pilgrimage in search of his beloved "beyond the
sphere that makes the widest round."
Interestingly he mentions that this occurs
"during the season when many people go to see
the blessed image [re-membrance] that Jesus
Christ left us as a visible sign of his most
beautiful countenance (which my lady beholds in
glory)" (82; italics mine)--the very countenance
to which Beatrice will ultimately lead him: the
"supernal" human face of God.
In Dante's Paradise, no desire can never be
useless. For the blessed, the re-membering of
love is completely unalloyed with suffering
because "what they desire, they have." Beatrice
argues that the best argument for the soul's
immortality is its longing for life; and the
same turns out to be the case for the body.
Dante's is not a paradise of desire overcome or
even desire disembodied. It is rather a paradise
of desire begetting ever more of itself, as it
is ever more perfectly fulfilled in the love of
others. Love-making is literally the essence of
Dante's Heaven: love expressed definitively in
the Incarnation--the embodiment, the
once-in-time and then permanent memberment--of
God. It is the embodied, resurrected, human God
who binds the "two natures" into one triune
Being Dante can apprehend--a Being who out of
love brings everything else into being and who
binds everything, material as well as spiritual,
into "a single volume bound by love."
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