Candor Lucis Aeternae by Pope Francis, Post 1

This is the first of two posts on the Apostolic Letter commemorating the 700^th anniversary of Dante’s passing.

The full title of this work is ”Apostolic Letter CANDOR LUCIS AETERNAE of the Holy Father FRANCIS on the Seventh Centenary of the Death of Dante Alighieri.”  Popes have various genres of writing forms they use to communicate with their faithful and with the world at large: encyclicals, motu proprio or rescripts, constitutions, bulls, exhortations, apostolic letters, and more.  Apostolic Letters are not quite as long as an encyclical, but they are not a brief note either.  I posted back in March that Pope Francis had just released an Apostolic Letter on the seventh hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death.  I read it and I want to post my thoughts on it.  Candor Lucis Aeternae is about 18 pages long, about that of a short story, and you can read the letter on line here.   

Candor Lucis Aeternae translates into “Splendor of Light Eternal,” and refers to the day the letter was published, March 25^th, the Feast of the Annunciation.  Here is the opening paragraph:

 

SPLENDOUR OF LIGHT ETERNAL, the Word of God became flesh from the Virgin Mary when, to the message of the angel, she responded: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (cf. Lk 1:38). The liturgical feast that celebrates this ineffable mystery held a special place in the life and work of the supreme poet Dante Alighieri, a prophet of hope and a witness to the innate yearning for the infinite present in the human heart. On this Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, I readily add my voice to the great chorus of those who honour his memory in the year marking the seventh centenary of his death.

Is there a particular reason why it’s connected to the Feast of the Annunciation?  Pope Francis identifies “the light of the Word made flesh” is part of “the loving plan that is the heart and inspiration of Dante’s most famous work.”  OK, but one could have easily picked Holy Thursday or any day of the Triduum and it could have been as fitting.  The Divine Comedy is set from Holy Thursday to Wednesday after Easter. 

After an introduction, the letter divides into nine sections:

 

1) The Popes of the last century and Dante Alighieri

2) The life of Dante Alighieri: a paradigm of the human condition

3) The poet's mission as a prophet of hope

4) Dante as the poet of human desire

5) The poet of God's mercy and human freedom

6) The image of man in the vision of God

7) The three women of the Comedy: Mary, Beatrice, and Lucy

8) Francis, the spouse of Lady Poverty

9) Accepting the testimony of Dante Alighieri

Pope Francis starts by summing up what the various Popes going back a century—to the sixth century of the poet’s death—have had to say about Dante and his great work, then showing how Dante’s life reflects the human condition.  He then provides several sections on the themes within The Divine Comedy, showing hope, human desire and freedom, and God’s mercy, and how the images of God reflect in man.  Pope Francis then highlights the three central women of the work, and Dante’s relationship with St. Francis of Assisi.  He concludes with final reasons why today people should read and appreciate Dante’s great work.

Some interesting highlights from past popes.  I found interesting Pope Benedict XV’s claim in his encyclical (In Praeclara Summorum, 30 April 1921) that Dante can only have come from Catholicism.

The fact that Alighieri is our own… Indeed, who can deny that our Dante nurtured and fanned the flame of his genius and poetic gifts by drawing inspiration from the Catholic faith, to such an extent that he celebrated the sublime mysteries of religion in a poem almost divine?”

That was written obviously in a time when ecumenicalism was not a priority.  But it is true.  Dante could only have written his work through his Catholic worldview.  It is a deeply Catholic work.  Still to claim Dante as “our own” may have dissuaded others from seeing the great beauty and universal themes in his poem.  This is exactly the point Pope Saint Paul VI makes in his Apostolic Letter of 1965, Altissimi Cantus.

“Dante is ours, we may well insist, but we say this not to treat him as a trophy for our own glorification, but to be reminded of our duty, in honouring him, to explore the inestimable treasures of Christian thought and sentiment present in his work. For we are convinced that only by better appreciating the religious spirit of the sovereign poet can we come to understand and savour more fully its marvellous spiritual riches”.

He goes on to say, “Dante’s poem is universal: in its immense scope, it embraces heaven and earth, eternity and time, divine mysteries and human events, sacred doctrine and teachings drawn from the light of reason, the fruits of personal experience and the annals of history”.  Pope Francis captures the full scope of Dante’s genius from another quote from Paul VI’s Letter:

 

“In Dante all human values – intellectual, moral, emotional, cultural and civic – are acknowledged and exalted. It should be noted, however, that this appreciation and esteem were the fruit of his deepening experience of the divine, as his contemplation was gradually purified of earthly elements”.

Yes, this is what makes Dante’s Commedia the single greatest work in all of literature: it captures all elements of humanity, captures all elements of divinity, expresses it beautifully in craft that can only be described as sublime, and creates an aesthetic structure that reflects all those elements artistically. 

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Perhaps the most original thought—at least one I had not come across before—in Candor Lucis Aeternae is the relationship Pope Francis draws from Dante’s life exile to the human condition and how it shaped his great work.

 

Dante, pondering his life of exile, radical uncertainty, fragility, and constant moving from place to place, sublimated and transformed his personal experience, making it a paradigm of the human condition, viewed as a journey – spiritual and physical – that continues until it reaches its goal. Here two fundamental themes of Dante’s entire work come to the fore, namely, that every existential journey begins with an innate desire in the human heart and that this desire attains fulfilment in the happiness bestowed by the vision of the Love who is God.

 

For all the tragic, sorrowful and distressing events he experienced, the great poet never surrendered or succumbed. He refused to repress his heart’s yearning for fulfilment and happiness or to resign himself to injustice, hypocrisy, the arrogance of the powerful or the selfishness that turns our world into “the threshing-floor that maketh us so proud” (Par. XXII, 151).

So the constant moving from city to city after his exile becomes sublimated into the journey of toward the beatific vision.  From his personal struggles to earn a living and find a stable home, Pope Francis identifies what caused Dante to create his poem:

 

Reviewing the events of his life above all in the light of faith, Dante discovered his personal vocation and mission. From this, paradoxically, he emerged no longer an apparent failure, a sinner, disillusioned and demoralized, but a prophet of hope. In the Letter to Cangrande della Scala, he described with remarkable clarity the aim of his life’s work, no longer pursued through political or military activity, but by poetry, the art of the word which, by speaking to all, has the power to change the life of each. “We must say briefly that the purpose of our whole work and its individual parts is to remove from their state of misery those who live this life and to lead them to a state of happiness” (XIII, 39 [15]). In this sense, it was meant to inspire a journey of liberation from every form of misery and human depravity (the “forest dark”), while at the same time pointing toward the ultimate goal of that journey: happiness, understood both as the fullness of life in time and history, and as eternal beatitude in God.

Just as the Resurrection is a sign of hope for our eternal life, so too does the Holy Father see the movement from dark forest to the beatific vision as an expression of hope that permeates the Divine Comedy.  I think “prophet of hope” is a fair moniker for Dante.