Dante and Mass Incarceration

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course seeks understanding of the relationship between justice and mercy at the intersection of theology, literature, and mass incarceration. This interdisciplinary encounter aims to be mutually critical and illuminating. Whereas theological reflection, language, and traditions are often employed as an interpretive lens for diagnosing the injustice of mass incarceration, this course also asks: in what ways might mass incarceration allow us in turn to consider, critique, and re-imagine the conceptual and moral injustices of theological reflection? Central to this intersection, accordingly, is literature, and in the context of the present course, Dante Alighieri's Comedy. This poetic intervention by a late medieval Catholic poet is all the more significant for being unexpected. Indeed, it is noteworthy that our especially Western inherited imaginaries of damnation, purgation, and salvation, not to mention their attendant conceptions of punishment and forgiveness, remain influenced by and indebted to Dante's theological architecture of the Comedy. Thus, on the one hand, it is all the more significant that Dante hell is emphatically carceral: he not only meditates upon those most dehumanized in the lowest circle of hell by means of a story of incarceration, but also refers to hell as such as a blind prison. And yet, on the other, it is equally striking that Dante continues to garner praise, not least by Pope Francis himself, as a prophet of hope uniquely situated to narrate the over-abundant mercy of God in the context of human life. This course, then, aims to explore this charged ambiguity between carceral despair and prophetic hope at the heart of the poem, as a means of refining understanding ultimately the relationship between justice and mercy in interpersonal, civic, and spiritual life. If we can affirm, alongside Cornel West, that justice is what love looks like in public, and if we can affirm, alongside Dante, that mercy is what love looks like for the sinner, then the opposite of justice is not mercy but despair, or the refusal of love. The course as a whole traces this refusal, and its possible repair, via paired readings of the Comedy and on the age of mass incarceration. First, we will consider, alongside the Inferno, Dante's burdened reflections on the nature of human exile, despair, and violence, and their medieval and contemporary instantiation in systems of punishment. Second, we will consider, largely alongside the Purgatorio and Paradiso, Dante's articulation of salvation as the reclamation of human community, realized in practices of justice and mercy, and taking the medieval and contemporary forms of human kinship, citizenship, and prophetic voice. Third, we will conduct a four-fold reflection on conceptions of justice, as variously punitive, restorative, transformative, and ultimately, creative.