'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.