Reaching for the bread of angels

"O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti dietro al mio legno, che cnatando varca:tornate a riveder li vostri liti, non vi mettete in pelago, chè forse, perdend me, rimarreste smarriti"

 "O you who in little barks, desirous of listening, have followed after my ship that sails onward singing: turn back to see your shores again, do not put out on the deep sea, for perhaps, losing me, you would be lost" -Paradiso 2:1-6

Detail from illuminated manuscript in Duomo library, Siena

I am going to push on with the journey despite Dante's warnings in Canto 2 of the perils therein.  Lately I have been thinking about the power of discussion. One of my blog readers reminded me of a favorite guide on this topic: Jurgen Habermas About Habermas. Habermas was writing at a time when words really mattered (post WWII Germany), and in a place where the stakes were pretty high (not unlike Dante in 14th century Italy).

Truth, to paraphrase Habermas, is what we would arrive at if we had access to information and an equal say in unrestricted dialogue.* As I struggle through Paradiso  (and no this is not a contradiction !), I wonder what discussions he imagined his words prompting. Certainly he meant for readers to be informed and to take our own journeys to knowledge-but how he meant early readers to act on his  words interests me. In his Epistle 13 (directed at his patron Can Grande and noted in our text), Dante says that he wants readers to take a journey from misery to happiness. He means this in a very broad sense. We are to pay attention as we read to notions of justice, Ben Comune  (good government), and virtue. But the deeply personal nature of the poem points to our individual accountability as well. We are to learn to read and learn, and to teach.

 I have a feeling I will be leaving my 6 weeks of intensely reading Dante prepared to intensely read Dante. Perhaps this is what Dante means by stretching ourselves to get " the bread of angels, which one lives on here though never sated by it".

* I am indebted to Rick Wilson and Howard Cell for discussion summaries on Habermas.