Tolkien and Dante

Did Tolkien Really Call Dante "Petty"?
Ink and Fantasy | 9 Aug. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vDP_2OGlH0

I don't know in what way you think Dante was important for Catholicism.

He was important for expressing it in Italian as to eschatology, but thousands of priests were already doing so.

"Among the many celebrated geniuses of whom the Catholic faith can boast who have left undying fruits in literature and art especially, besides other fields of learning, and to whom civilization and religion are ever in debt, highest stands the name of Dante Alighieri, the sixth centenary of whose death will soon be recorded. Never perhaps has his supreme position been recognized as it is today. Not only Italy, justly proud of having given him birth, but all the civil nations are preparing with special committees of learned men to celebrate his memory that the whole world may pay honour to that noble figure, pride and glory of humanity."

I think "religion" here means "piety" rather than Catholicism as such. I cited In Praeclara Summorum, by the way. It's more to the point when discussing Dante, than when Dimond brothers use it about Geocentrism, quotemining one specific sentence in the concessive subjunctive.

I also think that the Latin superlatives translated as "highest" and "supreme" should be translated as "very high" ... it's mainly civilisation that's in debt, Christian civilisation in Italy.

And I venture to say that while the praise of the Divine Comedy and arguably also Italian of Dante are honest, they are also partly tactical, since Anticlericals were saying on the one hand that not appreciating Dante would be barbaric, and on the other hand, they were celebrating him for things like "De Monarchia" which was anti-Papal, a precursor, with Marsilius, of the infamous Kulturkampf a few decades previously endured by German faithful Catholics.

Tolkien obviously didn't care for being at odds with a Papal encyclical. Probably, his own feeling about Dante was a mixture of enjoyment and of the irritation he had here expressed.

5:05 Dante's Divine Comedy, as far as I can tell, is not religious allegory, but religious science fiction ("theology fiction" or "eschatology fiction" if you like). Same genre as "Pearl" which no doubt both inspired The Great Divorce and pleased Tolkien more than Dante, as per lack of pettiness.

To specify, if Dante disliked someone for political or personal reasons, he probably placed that someone in Hell or Purgatory (if he had died). It's as if Tolkien had named Shagrath and Ugluk some recogniseable English known person's name.

In fact, that's not just Dante. Michelangelo placed someone in Hell, that someone complained to the Pope who answered "there is no absolution from Hell" ....

ἀστροπελέκι

@Astropeleki

Dante also placed someone in Hell before he had passed away, because he had betrayed his guests and had them killed.

The soul of that specific damned explains that if someone commits such a heinous sin, their soul descends into hell before they're even dead.

ἀστροπελέκι

Oh wait, it's literally mentioned in the video, hahaha

Well, I guess it was worth mentioning the context of this specific "petty" representation.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@Astropeleki It might have been a way to warn the guy, like in Michelangelo's case.

5:29 No, in the afterlife, people do NOT go from Hell to Purgatory.

As such a journey does not exist, Dante's work cannot be an allegory of that.

Also, while everyone in Purgatory goes to Heaven, they go from one specific place in Purgatory to one specific place in Heaven.

Again, what Dante writes is not an allegory for what in Catholic theology doesn't even occur.*

* Usually. The Comedy in fact describes a kind of sight-seeing of other people's fates, which could occur as an exception.