Ingesting Words: Reading per diletto and Sacramental Memory in Dante's Commedia

Abstract

Ingesting WordsReading per diletto and Sacramental Memory in Dante's Commedia Sonia Fanucchi (bio) Dante, Reading, Memory, Language, Sacrament This one who guides my eyes on highIs the very Virgil from whom you took the powerto sing of men and of the gods (Purg. 21. 124–6).1 These words, spoken by Dante's pilgrim to the newly redeemed Statius, capture the essence of Dante's approach to reading in the Com-media. In this exchange Virgil's Aeneid is indistinguishable from its author, whose powerfully personal voice reaches out to his readers across time. Thus, Statius's wish "To have lived on earth when Virgil lived" (Purg. 21. 100–1)2 is answered by Virgil's embodied presence, not as an impersonal text hearkening back to a distant past, but as a living, conversing memory. I would like to suggest that reading performs a memorial function for Dante, in the sense that it invokes the sacramental dimensions of the Eucharist, where the embodied Christ inspires his followers to reenact his passion in his command to "do this in memory of me." This contrasts with the self-indulgent tendency suggested by Francesca's phrase "per diletto" ("in pleasure," Inf. 5. 127), and has implications for Inferno's paradigmatic reading scene, as I intend to show. [End Page 117] The images of Christ holding an open book during the high Middle Ages associate books directly with the Logos.3 The notion that books open readers up sacramentally to the divine, as "we devour and digest the book, when we read the words of God,"4 was commonly held, and is rich in eucharistic associations. The practice of lectio divina taught that the word of God must be ingested sacramentally, with its spiritual effects being mirrored physically, so that to read was equated with taking the eucharistic host, collecting "every crumb … of the textual bread in study,"5 and "murmuring" in the same way as the mouth moves when taking the host.6 The connection was sometimes made even more explicit, such as when Hugh of St. Victor linked the image of St. John Evangelist eating a book to the relationship between Christ, the sacraments, and the Church.7 The parallels drawn here between reading and the sacraments suggest interesting implications for the way in which texts were believed to affect readers' memories. The enactment of the Eucharist is necessarily an act of memory: as Helmut Hoping suggests, the Eucharist is not only a "remembrance of the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples" but a "memorial" which renders our "redemption" present, sacramentally.8 When discussing the Eucharist, Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that the sacrament should be understood as a "form of life, a way of being and acting that encompasses the totality of Christ's historical life and mission."9 The idea that Christ's history and identity is constantly renewed and sacramentally conveyed to believers as an embodied presence, drawing them into an ongoing, reciprocal, personal drama is a central feature of the sacrament of the Eucharist,10 and goes back to the writings of St. Paul, who emphasized the consuming of the Body of Christ as an active, communal experience in his letter to the Corinthians: "The bread we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because it is one bread, we, the many, are one body" (1 Cor 10:16). Thomas Aquinas recalled this idea when he suggested that the Eucharist is an act of "Christ's love," arguing that "because it is the special feature of friendship to live together with friends … [Christ] … does not deprive us of His bodily presence; [End Page 118] but unites us with Himself in this sacrament through the truth of His body and blood."11 The consuming of Christ's body and blood was thus understood as an intimate experience, "a familiar union,"12 between persons, as Innocent III remarked when he suggested that Christ instituted this sacrament as an expression of his desire to be with us, through "the indwelling of grace" but also in his "corporeal presence."13 This suggests that the symbolic union with Christ in the sacraments was...