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Dante and Two Friars: Paradiso XI—XII

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Extract

A contemporary of Dante’s, opening the Divine Comedy for the first time, would probably have expected to find St. Francis among le beate genti, or at least to hear his praises sung by them, and that independently of any particular interest in the Franciscan Order, such was the esteem in which ‘il santo d‘Assisi’ was held. St. Dominic, on the other hand, an incomparably less popular figure, is unlikely even to have crossed the mind of such a reader except, perhaps, in connection with the well-known confraternity he founded. For the average Catholic of those times, Dominic had already become what he has remained, one of those holy ‘founders’ about whom one knows or cares little, well-nigh obscured as they are by the universally accepted and venerated institutes which they founded. Even the Dominicans themselves seem, on the whole, not to have fully appreciated the extraordinary character of the man to whom they owed so much. Apart from the biographical sketch in the Libellus of Jordan of Saxony (d. 1237), Dominic’s immediate successor in the government of the Order—a sketch which was historical rather than hagiographical, written that is to describe ‘the origin of the Order of Preachers’—and from the depositions by the witnesses at the two Processes, at Bologna and Toulouse, prior to his canonization in 1234, biographical material concerning Dominic is sparse, or, rather, scattered piecemeal among conventional legendary accretions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

* This abbreviated and slightly adapted version of a lecture originally given in Italian in 1982 was translated by Sister Mary John Ronayne OP of Carisbrooke. Another version of the text will be published under the title ‘Dante's Panegyrics of St Francis and St Dominic in the Divine Comedy (Paradiso XI–XII)’ in a collection of Dante studies. The translations of Dante which the Editor has added to the present version are taken from J.D. Sinclair's edition.

1 Litterae Encyclicae Magistrorum Generalium Ord. Proed. 1233-1376, edited by B.M. Reichert OP (M.O.F.P.H., vol V), Rome 1900.

2 cf St Thomas, Summa Theol. la 34,2; 37,1; 39;8.

3 ‘The Celebration of Order: Paradiso X’, Dante Studies, XC (1972), pp. 109–124; reprinted in The Two Dantes, London 1977.

4 Florence, Le Monnier, 1979, pp. 172–9.

5 Studi su Dante, Feltrinelli, p. 241.

6 cf MOPH XVI, p. 355.

7 op. cit. p. 231.

8 Who, in fact, had rejected this interpretation, cf. Summa Theol. 2a, 2ae, 185, 6.

9 cf. note 4 above.

10 English version from The Letters of Dante translated by P. Toynbee, Oxford, 1966, where the letter in question is listed as no. VIII.

11 cf Celano,Leg. seconda I, 11; Legenda maior 11, 10; Scripto Leonis, etc. ed. Brooke, pp. 92, 192; the passage from Bosco taken issue with here is in op. cit. pp. 173–4.

12 Lycidias, 123–5.

13 cf the passage from the Prologue to Bonaventure's Legenda maior already quoted.