The significance of the Bible for Dante’s Divine Comedy has always been accepted as an indisputable fact. Despite the poem’s innumerable echoes of classical traditions, the Church Fathers, and contemporary vernacular literature, no one can doubt that the Bible is by far the most important subtext for Dante. Still, V. Stanley Benfell’s book is the first extended study to use the links between the Divine Comedy and the Bible as its main focus. Unfortunately, the result is not as groundbreaking as one would expect from the title; one may wonder whether the book reveals the reasons for the lack of similar studies, rather than filling any lacuna.

In the introduction Benfell presents the theoretical premise of his exploration. His assumptions are clear enough, and also easy to agree with. The modernists’ exegeses of the Bible have reduced the literal sense to exclusively encompass the historical meaning; consequently the only accepted approach to the text is through historical, contextual reconstructions. According to Benfell, this has affected the readings of Dante. The first thing Benfell does, and he does it convincingly well in the first chapter, is to demonstrate how the understanding of literal sense has its own history. For a man like Dante, rooted in the medieval exegesis in the tradition of St. Augustine, the biblical letters contained all possible meanings. Thus, the letters represented a threshold, a necessary first step to the allegorical significances of the text. The early Protestants cut these bonds by transforming the idea of the letters’ hermeneutical thickness to a theory of transparency. Subsequently, Benfell’s aim appears to be twofold. He wishes, on the one hand, to demonstrate the hermeneutical richness in Dante’s poem; on the other, to show how Dante may guide his readers back to the premodern richness of the Bible.

Benfell’s claim is that Dante intended to rewrite the Bible because of the crisis of faith in his own time. As he writes, Dante composes his poem “to bring readers back to an encounter with the Bible, to help them see it again as key to a proper understanding of the world” (16). Throughout the book, then, he demonstrates how Dante considered the status of the Bible as scripture and as a text. He does so by analyzing central passages of the Divine Comedy, namely, the theological debates on faith in the Heaven of Jupiter (chapter 2), the political discussions of simony and the corruption of the Church in Inferno (chapter 3), the pilgrim’s encounter with the beatitudes during the ascent of the Purgatory mountain (chapter 4), and the apocalyptic visions in the Earthly Paradise (chapter 5). Applying Gadamer’s quite sentimental conception of hermeneutical truths on the Divine Comedy, he suggests that Dante sought to renew the Bible in order to “show its meaning for his own time” (195). Behind such simplistic readings there is a trap: reduced to a mere salvation project, the Divine Comedy tends to appear as nothing else other than exemplifications of Benfell’s own convictions, the “meaning for him.” However, the most disturbing aspect with this study of the biblical Dante is that it never touches the fundamental question about the connections and the tensions between the Bible and the poetry, the sacred and the secular in Dante’s vision. It is in the ambiguity of the poetic language — the constant confrontations between the fog of human experiences and the lucid visions of the divine — that the genius of Dante’s art is to be found.

Benfell makes clear in his conclusion that his book is an answer to Erich Auerbach’s Dante study, The Poet of the Secular World (1961). One may wonder, however, how it is possible to disregard Giuseppe Mazzotta’s Dante: Poet of the Desert (1979), which already decades ago powerfully corrected Auerbach’s reductionist and flat interpretations by bringing the two realms, the theological speculations and the secular world, together. Benfell’s book is somewhat backward also in other respects. In the many discussions about Dante’s authority, he never refers to the most important study written on this subject, namely, Albert Russell Ascoli’s Dante and the Making of a Modern Author (2008). The two books even share the same cover, which to this reader only witnesses Benfell’s profound lack of being updated.