God's Infinite Mercy
Reading Dante in the Year of Mercy
Pope Francis closes the Holy Door of St. Peter's Basilica to mark the conclusion of the jubilee Year of Mercy at the Vatican Nov. 20. (CNS photo/L'Osservatore Romano, handout)
Pope Francis’ proclamation of the Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2015-16 coincided with another important event in the world of Italian culture: the 750th anniversary of the birth of the epic poet Dante Alighieri, author of the medieval masterpiece known as the Divine Comedy. This happy coincidence was not lost on Francis, an avid reader of Dante and a former teacher of literature during his early years at a Jesuit high school in Argentina. In May 2015, seven months before the Year of Mercy, Francis delivered a formal message in praise of Dante to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture. Citing the enthusiasm for Dante of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Francis lauded the poet as “one of the most illustrious figures not only for Italians but for all of humanity” and urged Catholics to reread his “immortal works” during the Year of Mercy. Indeed Dante, whom Francis calls “a prophet of hope” and a “herald of the possibility of human redemption,” has much to teach Catholics today about the complex dynamics of mercy.
A major theme stressed by Pope Francis in the Year of Mercy has been the transformative power of the human journey of conversion, made possible by God’s boundless forgiveness. In “The Face of Mercy” ("Misericordiae Vultus"), the bull of indiction of the Jubilee of Mercy, Francis retrieves the medieval spiritual practice of pilgrimage, urging Christians to travel to the various Holy Doors of Mercy stationed at major cathedrals and basilicas around the world in order to experience the abundance of divine mercy for themselves. “Life itself is a pilgrimage, and the human being is a viator, a pilgrim traveling along the road,” Francis explains. And to make a pilgrimage is to undertake a journey of conversion: “by crossing the threshold of the Holy Door, we will find the strength to embrace God’s mercy and dedicate ourselves to being merciful with others as the Father has been with us” (No. 14). The Jubilee of Mercy, then, has the goal of promoting a more merciful church, more attuned to works of love than to attitudes of judgment.
Dante’s epic poem, itself staged as a pilgrimage through the three realms of the Christian afterlife set during Holy Week in 1300 (another jubilee year in the church), recounts the author’s own extraordinary journey of conversion. As the pilgrim travels from the “dark wood” of the Inferno, up through the seven-story mountain of the Purgatorio and out past the spheres and stars of the Paradiso to stand before the very face of God, Dante paints a double portrait of human redemption, blending the intensely personal with the broadly universal. The Divine Comedy envisions not only the individual salvation of its author but the global transformation of a world made new, in which readers and society as a whole are led by the poem “from a state of misery to a state of happiness” (Dante, Epistle 13, No. 15). Pope Francis stresses this duality that lies at the heart of the Comedy, arguing that we can read the poem as a “great itinerary” and a “true pilgrimage” that features two separate yet interconnected dimensions of conversion: “personal and interior” as well as “communal, ecclesial, social, and historic.” This journey, as Dante makes explicit from the very beginning of the poem, is initiated, sustained and transformed by divine mercy.
In what follows, I will trace the contours of what we might call Dante’s “itinerary of mercy,” a process that unfolds progressively through the three realms of the Divine Comedy. In the Inferno we learn that it is God’s mercy that first makes possible the pilgrim’s journey home to God; in the Purgatorio we see how God’s mercy transcends all possible boundaries, even those erected by the church, by bringing healing to even the worst sinners; finally, in the Paradiso we consider Dante’s point of arrival, wherethe poet provides us with a striking image of a renewed church, united in diversity and reconciled by mercy.
Inferno: Mercy as the Starting Point for a Journey of Conversion
“God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking His mercy.” Thus in the 2013 encyclical “The Joy of the Gospel” (No. 3) did Pope Francis reiterate his message of mercy, with which he began his papacy during his first Angelus address earlier that year. Mercy, in the view of Francis, changes everything: it creates new relationships and it allows for new paths to emerge where none previously existed. This is precisely the situation that Dante dramatizes in the first canto of the Inferno.
The poem famously begins in medias res, where the pilgrim awakes, midway through the journey of our mortal life, to find himself alone in a dark wood, in which the straight way is lost. Commentators have traditionally interpreted this dark wood allegorically: Dante is lost in a twisted forest of sin and perdition, impeded from pursuing the clear path of moral virtue by three savage beasts—a spotted leopard, a proud lion and a ravenous wolf, representing the vices of lust, pride and avarice—who repeatedly block his ability to ascend the sunlit hill lying beyond the wood. Beyond the allegorical significance of these details, Dante draws our attention to the raw emotion, the sheer terror, confusion and hopelessness that he experiences while spinning helplessly amid the trees: “It is so bitter that death is little more so!”(Inferno, 1.7; I rely on the translation of Ronald L. Martinez and Robert M. Durling). At this precise point, where the journey is nearly over before it begins, a shadowy figure suddenly emerges on the horizon, whom Dante spontaneously asks for mercy:
When I saw him in the great wilderness,
“Miserere—on me,” I cried to him,
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