'Lightness' in Dante and Kierkegaard

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.