Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Elsky, Martin

Titel

The Sexcentenary Commemoration of Dante’s Death and the German Re-Confessionalization of Dante: Friedrich Muckermann and der Gral

Ist Teil von

• Mediaevalia (Binghamton, N.Y.), 2017, Vol.38 (1), p.129-168

Ort / Verlag

Binghampton: State University of New York Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

International Bibliography of Art (IBA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The tussle between Catholics and Protestants over Dante is one of the most remarkable examples of the transmigration of a monumental literary work across religious denominations in a process we might call re-confessionalization, or the revisionist transformation of religious identity.1 Muckermann intended his special Dante issue and his own essays in it to contribute in a major way not only to this Catholic re-confessionalization of Dante, but also, through it, to a larger literary program that would influence artistic culture in the new Germany, against a background of the harmful forces of modern literature that he associated with the factional, feuding atmosphere of Weimar. After the treatise had been on the Index of Prohibited Books for centuries, Dante's rehabilitation in the Catholic Church began with Leo XIII, who removed the work from the Index in the 1880s, and under whose auspices Dante was redefined by the German Vatican theologian Franz Hettinger as orthodox by virtue of his putatively thorough Thomism. Benedict begins by asserting that Catholics should take the lead in civil celebrations because "the Church has special right to call Alighieri hers" (par. 2), and that Catholic intellectuals should declare "the intimate union of Dante with this Chair of Peter" (par. 3)-a very public announcement of the reversal of the centuries-long condemnation of Dante's treatment of the papacy. On this basis, rescuing Catholicism from charges of cultural and aesthetic regressiveness, Benedict thus reminds his audience that Dante is the supreme example that adherence to Catholic faith is an incitement rather than a hindrance to great poetry (par. 10), cautioning nevertheless that, while the Divina Commedia may result in intellectual enjoyment and the improvement of artistic taste, the true goal of the poetry is "spiritual nourishment."