Dante's Paradiso and Modern Readers

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2007/12/paradise_lost.html

Virtually any book has some conflict that the author resolves in the course of the book, be it a war between factions or an unexplained problem.  Robert Baird’s piece suggests that the disparity between Earth’s chaos and Heaven’s peace causes Paradiso’s conflict.  In other words, the globe is the antagonist, and Heaven is the protagonist, which might be why few people enjoy Paradiso because few people enjoy playing the stupid antagonist.  Although his analysis is accurate, the problem I see is that our culture doesn’t see opinions with various degrees of merit; instead, every opinion is equal to the next. Thus, a world where everything runs perfectly according to divine omniscience is foreign to modern readers who live in a culture wracked by myopic violence and greed without a solution in sight. 

In the events after Purgatorio, Dante is no longer the everyman but a prophet to the unlearned, which distances himself from us, because he has divine revelation that we are not to privy to.  Because no living individual is perfect, a perfect person is foreign to the human experience.  However, the individual might be in the middle of purification, such as the recovering addict or reforming slob. Nevertheless, the person never becomes perfect but simply graduates from one metaphorical terrace to another, from drug addiction to procrastination to evil thoughts.  During Purgatorio, Dante becomes increasingly foreign because he approaches closer and closer to perfection.  At the summit, Virgil cannot guide him because Dante’s soul is perfect.  His behavior and intent is no longer human in the sense that humans are imperfect creatures.  In Paradiso, his occasional gaps in knowledge remind us that he is still human; however, those gaps also remind us that Dante is separate from us because the shades fill these gaps without the reader’s knowledge while Beatrice instructs Dante to become a prophet or messenger.  Thus, our opinions lack footing because we lack knowledge.  Today, the political rants and anti-intellectual streaks could only come about in a culture that believes the opinion of a mommy blogger somehow equals the PhD virologist who spent 7 grueling years to get those 3 letters and another 5 years in limbo to secure a lab position.  Accepting a lecture by an omniscient shade would be unthinkable in this culture since PhDs are the closest to omniscience within a given field, which is still very far from actual omniscience.

Problems of relating to the reader would not be so bad if Dante’s time meshed with our time.  However, 700 years separate him from us, which the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, urbanization, World War I and II, etc. occurred in that time. Despite the constancy of human nature, historical events radically shift human values.  The politics and culture in his day would have made Paradiso at least accessible to his audience.  Still, heaven portrayed by Dante would still lose some of them.  He consistently points out that his narrative is not for the weak and beyond human experience.    People today are removed from Paradiso’s context even if the problems are identical because Dante’s solutions are antithetical to American values, such as free will, limited government, and separated branches.  Furthermore, Dante’s theology further removes most American readers who are probably non-Catholic.  Thus, modern readers must acquaint themselves with the context that Dante’s contemporaries would have understood.