## 'Lightness' in Dante and Kierkegaard

In *Fear and Trembling*, Johannes de Silentio draws on the strikingly Dantean metaphor of lightness as a way to explicate the paradoxical nature of the relationship between the individual and eternal will and the satisfaction of our human desire for unconstrained freedom. Through the *Divine Comedy*, the trope of weight is used through all three Canticles as a metaphor which allegorizes the relationship the freedom of the individual's will in its relationship to itself and God. This allegory is most prominently rendered in the *Purgatorio*, where it becomes clear that the liminal space between heaven and hell is governed by a gravitational tension between the two. Because of this, the pilgrim in purgatory experiences "lightness" as a radical change in the nature of his own will which frees him to enter into heaven, and—paradoxically—frees him *from* himself *unto* himself.

Both Johannes' knight of faith and Dante's pilgrim have similarities in the cause their lightness—namely, the resignation of the self in relationship to God through which the self is gained back in the freedom originally sought. The manner of their lightness differs in part because of the different forces which Johannes and Dante attribute to the manner of the downward pull—for Dante it is the gross, unconformed desires of the will, while for Johannes it is the intractability of aligning the self with a rationalist universal to free the will. For Dante it is the carnal nature which restricts the satisfaction of the free will, for Johannes it is the rationalistic. What Dante renders "lightness" through poetically incorporating both the Scholastic and Augustinian-Franciscan tradition of the self in relation to God, Kierkegaard reiterates in response to German idealism. Using Dante and Johannes' rendering of the connection between the individual and God it is possible to gesture toward details of "personness" and how it may be shared by the individual and God. Both Johannes' knight of faith and Dante's pilgrim converge on the freedom of the self and its ontological ground: entering into a personal relation with a personal ground of being provides the upward eternal force in which they are suspended in lightness.

## The cause of their lightness

Dante—or presumably any pilgrim who has scaled mount purgatory—is light for two reasons: the individual has been purged of the gravitational pull of the sinful appetite, all while moving closer to the source of 'upward' (rather than downward) gravity of the Holy center. There is a 'double movement' in which he is paradoxically purged of the 'wrongness of will' and simultaneously enters into a state in which 'all will is right.' Having completed the ascent from the circle of pride in *Purgatorio* Dante reflects, "Now we were climbing on the hallowed stairs / and I felt so much lighter than before" (12.115-116). So he asks Virgil, "what weight has been lifted from me / that going on is hardly any effort?" (12.119-120) and Virgil answers:

> [...] 'When the P's that still remain / upon your brow, though very faint, shall be, / as one already is, erased, / your legs shall be so mastered by good will, / not only will they feel no effort going up, / but they will take delight in being urged to.' (12.121-126)[^1]

Just as Satan writhes in pride at the center of the earth, the inverse implication is that one feels the downward weight as a result of the wrongness of will. Being mastered by good will not only lightens one with 'upward gravity,' but also redirects the desires upward.

There in lies a fundamental paradox in the lightness of Dante's pilgrims: there is both an upward and a downward gravity. The upward gravity pulls the pilgrim toward the Holy center, the downward gravity, though it is in the search of *the same freedom* looks to the self rather than God. The *gravitational inclination* to discover a space in which the will is freely asserted is not inherently wrong. But, this is the paradox: assent to the loss of will (one could daresay 'infinite resignation') is the only movement by which it can be made free.[^2] The metaphysical logic of this "lightness" and gravity undergirds Beatrice's exposition of the vow in *Paradiso*: "'Two things compose the essence / of this sacrificial act, / first that which is promised, then the pact itself. / This pact can never be annulled / until it is fulfilled [...]'" (5.40-47).[^3] The capacity for the absolute will to bind itself in a vow is, in point of fact, *the consummate exercise of its most essential freedom*. This is the same logic in which Jesus is rendered *essentially* divine in John's gospel:

> For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it again. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. (10: 17-18a, *NASB* )

Of course those listening to Jesus respond to this sentiment by accusing him of being possessed by a demon because he is insinuating that he is God. But what Jesus gestures toward here—and what Dante and Beatrice will pick up on with regard to the will—is the paradox which undergirds the relationship between a person and a personal God.[^4] As far as one can tell from Jesus' words, the Father sacrifices his own will such that Jesus can sacrifice *his* own will *on his own accord*. The sacrificial movement of the self unto a personal ground of being *which is revealed as sacrificial in itself* results in both gaining back everything and more.

On the other hand, the search for a free center *in the self* (i.e. Dantean "pride") inevitably discovers stasis rather than freedom as is shown in Cocytus. But by assenting to the gravity outside oneself (e.g. God) the individual is in fact thrown into a lightness which instead of being bound in some utterly subjected posture (as we may often presume with fear and trembling), actually enables the lightness and freedom of the self due to the sacrificially personal nature of God-self.[^5] And this, as Moevs concludes, is the import of the metaphysics of Dante's *Divine Comedy* and its climax in the Empyrean:

> Gradually gaining perspective, the subject of all experience, reflected as a finite power of awareness and love, begins to awaken to itself, ultimately to discover itself, on the threshold of the Empyrean, as an extensionless point, immune to and yet containing as itself all space and time, the horizon and nexus between contingency and self-subsistence.[^6]

Thus, by assenting to the gravity of a center outside oneself, the individual paradoxically finds the very freedom of will originally sought having now found itself grounded—or better, *suspended* —in God-self.

This is arguably the very same movement of Johannes' knight of faith, where he resigns his will in its insurmountable powerlessness but through the leap of faith enters into a relationship with the eternal being that sets his will in absolute relation to the absolute.[^7] This begins with the movement of infinite resignation, made by the self, which Johannes often laments he can not go beyond himself. What he gains as a result "is myself in my eternal consciousness in blessed harmony with my love for the eternal being."[^8] But this is not the final movement of faith—faith does not "renounce anything" or, in a sense, perpetuate the logic of its initial resignation but "on the contrary, by faith I receive everything, exactly in the sense in which it is said that one who has faith like a mustard seed can mountains."[^9] The relationship with the eternal gained through the infinite movement affords the knight of faith a "lightness" in his movements through the world. The cause of the lightness of the knight of faith, is his capacity to reenter the contingent world and bring with him the air of infinity and eternity. As Johannes writes of the knight who has come down from infinity:

> [...] to be able to land in such a way that it looks as if one were simultaneously standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a gait, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian that only the knight of faith can do—and that is the only miracle.[^10]

The lightness is a result of knight of faith who can enter back into the finite realm in homogeneity with the infinite. Johannes' imagined knight of faith—imagined because he has never found an exemplar—by virtue of the absurd has gained the finite world back in its entirety. He possesses, in a sense, a free will and a free self by the virtue of his ability to make at every moment the movement of infinity. But he has so perfected the movement of faith that it is unrecognizable to the outsider.[^11] For Dante and Johannes de Silentio, lightness is arguably due to a ' *suspension* of the ethical' (although in difference senses). In both cases, entering into a relationship with the personal Center reconfigures the relationship between the absolute and the individual; the universal and the particular. Because the very shared nature of the "personal" regards the essential "personness" of the other, by submitting oneself to the absolute one is not bound, but paradoxically freed. In a word, the cause of the lightness in both Dante's pilgrim and Johannes' knight of faith is a result of a resignation of the will and entering into a relationship with God-self, in which, paradoxically, the individual's will is gained back.

## The manner of their lightness

This difference in the manner of the lightness obtained by both the pilgrim of Purgatory and the knight of faith is highlighted by the rationality of ethical contemplation which initially diverge, but converge at the suspension already insinuated. The downward pull on Dante's pilgrim is the carnal nature of the desires of the will and the self's supplication to that nature in search for freedom. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, seems primarily concerned with the gross intellectualism of his contemporaries. Johannes often laments that when the final movement of faith comes beyond the act of infinite resignation by which one gains an eternal consciousness "a monstrous anxiety grips [his soul]" and he cannot make the movement of faith: "I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd."[^12] The first movement is "a purely philosophical movement" but Abraham "believed by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation had long since ceased."[^13] He continues, "whoever loves God without faith considers himself, but whoever loves God with faith considers God."[^14] The problem is that the final movement of faith into which the knight of faith becomes suspended in the eternal (while still in the finite) cannot be accomplished by the "clever" philosopher because of its fundamental absurdity.[^15]

Although Johannes may push back against the import of neo-Platonic intellect in Dante, there lies a critical unity to the lightness for both the pilgrim and the knight of faith: the personal center.[^16] An aporia is found at the heart of both as it is with the essence of any personal being, but first, there lies a distinction in the nature of this cosmological center in which we gain suspension. Dante is lightened by the seeming *stability* of a transcendent Center governed by an Intellect beyond rationality (the Intellect is necessarily ordered). A Dante relates to Beatrice: "I now see clearly that our intellect / cannot be satisfied until that truth enlighten it / beyond whose boundary no further truth extends" ( *Pd* 4.124-126). Johannes' knight of faith on the other hand is lightened in the seeming *instability* of the Center as it is deprived of the stability given by Reason and appears itself to be bound to the very absurdity of contingent experience itself. Moevs writes of Dante and his milieu: "In a medieval context, meaning or value must thus be grounded in the transcendent, not the contingent. Any meaning recognized in the contingent and ephemeral—in the world—must be ground in the non-contingent and transcendent [...]."[^17] This, however, is the trend which Kierkegaard sees collapsing around him, and turns upon its head.

Nevertheless, both Dante and Johannes converge again on the lightness with which the pilgrim and knight of faith reenter the finite world. The circle of gluttony ends with a strikingly Augustinian blessing: "Blessed are they / whom grace so much enlightens that appetite / fills not their breasts with gross desires, / but leaves them hungering for what is just." The pilgrim's will is freed first by its conformation to a holy will, and then gained back entirely in the garden of Eden. The knight of faith, on the other hand, is freed first by the recognition of the fundamental absurdity of ethical rationalism at the awe-inspiring feet of faith. But both reenter back a finite world with the freedom originally sought. For the knight of faith, even "a freedom from care as if he were a reckless good-for-nothing."[^18] Both have a will, being suspended in relation to the eternal center, with reenters the finite having been completely resigned or surrendered to the will of God which gifts them back the freedom originally sought.

## The freedom of their lightness (A conclusion)

By Johannes' frustration with intellectualism in a response to German Idealism, Kierkegaard positions himself at the existential turning point of the western philosophical tradition. When compared to Dante, the metaphysical nature of this turning point comes into greater focus: what the rationalist and enlightenment tradition inherited from the transcendental stability of the consciousness, Kierkegaard exposes as misled. Not only is our existential experience of consciousness one of instability, but if the cosmological center is in fact personal, and we are in relation to it, then a fundamental instability is revealed in the very rational nature of existence itself. Only once we observe this instability (i.e. *qua* "absurdity"), and take the leap of faith, do we then become light by placing ourselves in absolute relation to the absolute. Although Dante may take a higher view of the Intellect than Kierkegaard both approach the same *mysterion* of God, but from different angles.

This is not to say however, that Dante does not see beyond the limits of the purely contemplative ascent. Instead Dante and Kierkegaard reveal two sides of the same coin. As Moevs concludes about Dante's project:

> Philosophical-theological inquiry, fused as one with the moral journey and with poetic experience, dissolves conceptual illusion, the distortions in understanding that impede awakening; beauty, the substance of poetry itself (sweetness, harmony, music), suspends the mind from concepts, judgment, and fear to mediate an intimation of the infinite in the particular, to deliver the awakening shock of the transcendent, to focus the human thirst for freedom and being.[^19]

Especially because of Moevs particularly Kierkegaardian language, Johannes could find little disagreement with this sentiment. By both casting aside the deterministic (arguably gnostic) potentialities of rationalism the pilgrim and the knight both seek a suspension in a stable yet unstable—and as such *personal* —center of the universe which catalyzes the continuity of the infinite with the finite and *vice versa* as shown by the existential experience of the faith-full. That the sacrifice and resignation of the will to God is rewarded by the deepest quenching of "the human thirst for freedom and being," is, by all means, an absurdity beyond understanding.

These congruent tropes revolve around divergent glosses of the same paradoxical nature of a personal being in which we are grounded: the *personal* dimension of a theological center implies an intelligible stability because of its relationship to rationality; *but,* it also reveals an instability by which the personal dimension of that center is in constant redefinition because of the inter-subjectivity fundamental to the reality of a *personal* dimension. Both recover lightness only once it is lost in the ungraspable "glory" and "absurdity" of God respectively. In both cases however, this aporia also governs the way in which the will is given back, as *gift*, to the individual only once it has resigned it-self to the Other.

As shown, it is possible to read Kierkegaard in *Fear and Trembling* as an attempt to reassert the same lightness seen in Dante's medieval theo-poetics during a time when notions of the Intellect and rationalism are collapsing. Through this trope of lightness the reader discovers a central univocity between Dante and Kierkegaard despite bifurcating somewhat on the nature of the ethical and rational as governing forces which bring one into relationship with God. They move with "lightness" in the finite realm of choice and desire, but for different reasons—Dante's pilgrim is no longer weighed down to stasis by carnal desire, while the knight of faith is freed from the static relation of the individual to the idealist "universal." Both Dante's pilgrim and Johannes' knight of faith gain their will and self freedom back in the freedom originally sought by paradoxical nature of the surrender of the will to the personal, eternal center of all being—suspended, in lightness among the finite, like stars.

[^1]: Dante Alighieri, *Purgatorio,* trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). 257-259.

[^2]: See Christian Moevs, *The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy* (Oxford UP, 2005). 169: "Dante's Comedy is built on the principle that when the individual subject of experience, having shed the *scoglio* or slough ( *Pg* 2.122–123) of the exclusive self-identification with the finite, fully awakens to itself, it finds itself in the Empyrean, knowing itself as (one with) the awareness-actuality-being-love that—since it is nothing in itself—is not in the world, but rather contains the world."

[^3]: Dante Alighieri, *Paradiso,* trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2007). 125.

[^4]: Søren Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling,* trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge UP, 2006). 48: "Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal and is justified over against the latter not as subordinate but superior to it, yet in such a way, mind you, that it is the single individual who, after having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now through the universal becomes the single individual who as the particular is superior to it; [faith is this paradox] that the single individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute." Opposed to how Kantian or Hegelian logic would consider any "universal" as over and above the individual, the paradox of faith reveals that the universal is of such a peculiar configuration that it places itself in subordination to the particular as a result of the individual's subordination to it. Johannes here needs to be perfectly clear in order to emphasize that an individual does not become superior by becoming one and the same as the universal, but superior as a particular over the universal. Against all apparent logic, the universal is such that it is, in essence, subordinate to the particular by the virtue of faith.

[^5]: Cf. Rudolf Otto, *The Idea of the Holy,* trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford UP, 1936). 19: "But it should be noted that the idea of the Wrath of God in the Bible is always a synthesis, in which the original is combined with the later meaning that has come to fill it in. Something supra-rational throbs and gleams, palpable and visible, in the 'Wrath of God', prompting to a sense of 'terror' that no 'natural' anger can arouse."

[^6]: Moevs, *The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy*. 185.

[^7]: See Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 41: For whenever something finite gets beyond my control, I starve myself until I make the movement [of infinite resignation], for my eternal consciousness is my love for God, and for me that is higher than anything.

[^8]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 41.

[^9]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 41.

[^10]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 34.

[^11]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 33f.

[^12]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 41, 28.

[^13]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 41, 30.

[^14]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 30.

[^15]: Cf. Otto, *The Idea of the Holy*., 22: Following his critique (contemporary to Kierkegaard's) of Schleiermacher's 'creature-feeling' i.e. 'feeling of dependence, writes "The point from which speculation starts is not a 'consciousness of absolute dependence'—of myself as result and effect of a divine cause—for that would in point of fact lead to insistence upon the reality of the self; it starts from a consciousness of the absolute superiority or supremacy of a power other than myself, and it is only as it falls back upon ontological terms to achieve its end—terms generally borrowed from natural science—that that element of the 'tremendum', originally apprehended as 'plenitude of power', becomes transmuted into 'plenitude of being'."

[^16]: Cf. Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 35 n. C: "Every movement of infinity occurs through passion, and no reflection can bring about a movement."

[^17]: Moevs, *The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy*.

[^18]: Kierkegaard, *Fear and Trembling*. 34.

[^19]: Moevs, *The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy*. 185.