Dante, Themes of Love, and Transformation through Literature: Part I
A conversation with Dr. Paul Camacho of Villanova University
I. Introduction
Dr. Paul Camacho, Associate Director of the Augustinian Institute and Associate Teaching Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was kind enough to sit down and speak with me about themes in Dante.
His research centers on the relationship between love and freedom in the western philosophical tradition, and he often writes at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and literature.
We had a wide ranging conversation that touched on his teaching philosophy, St. Augustine, the role of love in Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as the significance of Beatrice.
II. Educational Philosophy and Metanoia
Lisa: Dr. Camacho, welcome, and thank you so much for this opportunity to speak together. I know that both myself and our readers are going to enjoy our conversation.
Paul Camacho: Thank you
Lisa: Let me introduce the project that I’m undertaking with my friend Vashik Armenikus. He curates the Genius & Ink newsletter on Substack, and together we write twice weekly posts in which we study, one canto at a time, the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy. We began in January 2025, covering two cantos per week, and we’re scheduled to finish on Christmas Day. As we speak, we’ve just entered the seventh terrace of Purgatory, and we’re moving toward meeting Beatrice and ascending to the Paradiso.
There's two themes I’d like to cover today. One is Virgil’s Discourse on Love in the center of Purgatory and the importance of its placement within the Comedy. I’d also like to look at the role of Beatrice and the levels on which we can understand her: as the real woman, what Dante’s love for her symbolizes, or what the meaning of her position in the Paradiso symbolizes as well.
But to begin, I was reading up on your areas of specialization and teaching philosophy, and found it really refreshing, especially now when we see so many attacks on Academia and what it has to offer; I thought that the philosophy that you put forth was very organic. It was spiritual without saying that it was spiritual, because it talked about transformation in the student.
It fits in with the greater scope and purpose of the Divine Comedy in relation to personal transformation; literature and philosophy are tools for transformation, not just things to read on a page. I think of Plato, where the dialogue form itself is a tool for transformation.
With that in mind, can you start off by talking a little bit about the idea in your teaching philosophy, that “the measure of a true education is metanoia, which is the radical conversion of mind and life, that each of us must achieve in a personal and decisive way.” Can you speak to that idea, that radical conversion of mind and life, and how we can dive into a text to allow it to work in a transformative way?
Paul Camacho: Sure, and thanks for such a wonderful introduction. This project seems really worthy, and as you alluded to, really urgent I think, today. What I was trying to express in my teaching statement, and this is something that I’ve thought a lot about, and discussed a lot with my colleagues here in the humanities department at Villanova, is that while it’s important for students to gain information, it’s increasingly a super abundant resource right now.
That’s only being accelerated now with artificial, so-called ‘intelligence.’ It’s easier than ever to get information, and if we think that learning is primarily about acquiring information, then it becomes a contractual model where we pay and we gain something. It’s a very commercialized kind of view.
But the ancient, original model of education—you alluded to Plato—wasn’t about getting information, it was about a transformation of the way in which we relate to the world. The word for that was wisdom, and philosophy is a love of wisdom, and that means in the pursuit of it, in the seeking of it, the self is actually transformed. So you’re right, that happens in dialogical exchange for Plato, but it also happens—and this is a really important theme in Plato and in Dante—it’s also the kind of transformation that happens when you fall in love.
When you fall in love in a very concrete way, when you fall in love with another person, it’s true that you’re interested in what we call “getting to know them.” But what is really happening to you is not that you want to acquire more information, but that you want to get lost in them. You want to become worthy of the beauty of the other person; and so the advent of this beloved ‘other’ who awakens something in you, what Plato describes as “in love,” this advent of beauty then calls on you to transform your own life in some way to be worthy of what it is that was gifted to you.
So the question for me has always been what does that have to do with education, with the classroom; many contemporary students think of education as getting a credential, getting your degree, and then you’re able to go on and use that in some way. That’s an important part of the contemporary university to be sure, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But the longer philosophical and pedagogical understanding of education is what we used to called liberal education; liberal in the sense in that it frees us from illusions, but also it frees us from our own self delusions, the things that we clutch onto that are keeping us from seeing the world rightly. It’s also liberal because it frees us into something beyond the world, what Joseph Pieper calls the “totalizing world of work,” and instead frees us into something that’s more human—not just labor, but getting in touch with what’s true, what’s good, what’s beautiful, and how that transforms our lives.
Lisa: I just love that approach; I know this has nothing to do with Dante yet, but do you feel that your students are receptive to that kind of engagement rather than just the gathering of information?
Paul Camacho: I’ll say three things about that. One, at first we’re rowing against the current so to speak, because higher education and the paradigm of higher education costs an exorbitant amount of money, right? There is a real fear about getting a job one day, an understandable one; there’s a lot of anxieties, there’s a lot of market and economic pressures, professionalization etc., so you have that on the one hand, and those are real and urgent concerns. On the other hand, I love teaching 18 to 22 year old students, in part because although sometimes I worry that they’ve become cynical before their age, there’s this real longing, we might call it the idealism of youth, but I think there’s a realism there of wanting, the longing of the human spirit, to want something more.
Lisa: Yes, to long for a connection to something, but they don’t know what yet.
Paul Camacho: Yes that’s right; Then there is the third thing, and this dawned on me awhile ago, and is one of the reasons I love teaching Plato, but also really love teaching Dante.
We structure our classes in ways where we’re not trying to impart information but we’re diving deep into a primary text that’s as much a member of the conversation as the professor and as the students, and the questions that are being asked aren’t dead questions—it’s not information to be imparted, it’s questions to be lived, engaged with, wrestled with, and then taken on, as urgent and important for any human being, at any time.
Lisa: For people who aren’t in academia, and aren’t in school, I’m seeing this resurgence of people trying to connect in other ways, so for instance on Substack, or online study groups, they’re just everywhere.
Paul Camacho: That’s right, there’s a hunger.
Lisa: There really is, to connect with other people, and to dive into and live philosophy as a way of life.
Paul Camacho: That’s right, that’s exactly right. I think that recovering something of that is important, especially today when, as we started talking about, we’re inundated with information. But it’s also when everything can be summarized by an algorithm or artificial intelligence and the question is, why read the primary texts in the first place? I think my answer certainly is that when we engage in those things together, we’re engaged in the project of entering into a conversation that was taking place before us, and then taking it up as a gift that was given to us and also as something that we’re continuing.
III. The Divine Comedy as Transformative Power
Lisa: We’re like a link in the chain, to keep that greater conversation going. I see that in our study group readers, that even if they don’t understand every background reference in Dante’s Divine Comedy, they want to know. They want the classical references, they want the philosophical references, because that creates another spark. They may now want to go read Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or St. Augustine. That’s one reason I wanted to have this conversation with you, because I’m surrounded by people, not necessarily in academia, who have that hunger, and this is the exact path we’re looking for, that transformative path.
Paul Camacho: Dante understood this so well, and it just boggles my mind, the levels at which he’s writing…every verse, every tercet, every canto, he’s writing for the intelligentsia of his day, he’s writing as a wildly accomplished and talented poet, he’s writing in reference to pagan mythology, Roman mythology, Christian scripture, but he’s also just writing a really amazing and moving love story and adventure story. I sometimes joke with my students that it’s a buddy cop movie as well-he and Virgil go into hell, they climb the mountain, they get the girl—so he’s doing that on all these levels.
I think it was Vittorio Montemaggi, a Dante Scholar whom I really admire, who said we’ll misunderstand the Divine Comedy if we forget that Dante, in everything he’s doing, is writing to convert us to the vision that he was granted in the poem. And Dante’s own pedagogical strategy is to give us something that is rhetorically moving, that’s beautiful in itself, but doesn’t terminate in the poem, but rather, it points us beyond it to the beauty that will transform us. He’s intending to do the very thing we’ve just been talking about in terms of education by way of his own artistic accomplishment and gift to us.
Lisa: He planned that out very specifically, too, didn’t he?
Paul Camacho: That’s right. I know we want to talk about Beatrice and we want to talk about the center of the poem, but this for me is what’s really central—literally central—to the Divine Comedy. In the same way we were just talking about education as an affair of the heart, as a transformation accomplished through love, that by falling in love with something that’s greater than yourself that pulls you along, which you’ll be seeking after for the rest of your life; that’s the kind of pedagogical strategy I see in the Divine Comedy.
Lisa: Now, does this have any relation to the four allegorical levels of interpretation in the Letter to Cangrande?1 Does that contribute to the transformation, or is that a separate thing?
Paul Camacho: That’s separate from what I’m thinking of right now, although of course Dante is drawing on a whole long tradition, especially at the levels of interpretation; that comes from the Church fathers, from scriptural interpretation.
Lisa: That’s referring to who, maybe Philo of Alexandria?
Paul Camacho: It runs through the whole of the Fathers, especially Tertullian and Origen, Origen especially perfected these four, but it was taken up into the Scholastic period; so at a technical level I think that’s going on, but I meant more in a kind of rhetorical and poetic sense. Dante writes with a kind of finesse, and this is what makes it, to my mind, the greatest poem that was ever written. He simultaneously has a pedagogical aim while he’s loving the language with which he’s working; he has philosophical intentions and training and reflection while he’s also writing an adventure story, and both honoring and making fun of the poets who have come before him and drawing on his own tradition, so he’s this great syncretist, but filtered through his own genius; there are many other genius systematic epic poets, but what makes it a great and lasting work is precisely that he wants us to live that way of falling in love with the disclosure of a kind a beauty that moves you to transform your life.
You alluded to it, but the Divine Comedy wouldn’t exist without his encounter with Beatrice and his falling in love, and the philosophical and poetic reflection on how that required him to transform, or take on La Vita Nuova, the new life. But it seems to me, and we can talk more concretely, that that’s the engine of the Divine Comedy.
Lisa: We’ll definitely touch a lot more on Beatrice, but I think that gives our readers a really good framework from which to absorb the work as a whole, and then to watch that transformation happen within themselves as they go through it.
For instance, every time I’ve gone through the Inferno, I felt that on every level, it was taking a personal inventory; asking myself, is there a seed of that in me? At first you read the sin and the punishment, and you think “I don’t do that,” but then you ask “Wait, but do I? Even in some small way?” That’s part of the transformative work, to read it and apply it, to use it as a mirror in a way, to cleanse yourself as you’re reading it.
Paul Camacho: I think that’s right, and I think that famously, readers often only encounter Dante's Inferno.
Lisa: That’s what I’m noticing, a lot of people read that and they get a little bored with the idea of Purgatory, with the work involved, don’t they?
Paul Camacho: It hurts my heart, because Purgatory is my favorite book. I want to say something about the sweep of the Comedy as a whole, because you were making this great observation about the way in which, as you go through down into the circles of the Inferno there’s this cause for self reflection, for introspection, for identification, a kind of searching of conscience.
We can think of the way the cantos are divided in two senses along these lines: one is that the Inferno is a descent, it’s a descent into the gravity of sin. The Purgatorio is an ascent because it’s rehabilitating the will, and much like if you get out of shape, getting back into shape is a slog at first and then it becomes easier and easier to do as you go along; that’s the trajectory of the Purgatorio.
The Inferno is sort of seeing what sin really looks like stripped away of the glamour, the excess, the falsities, of this life that can cover over the reality of that sin. So in the contrapasso you see the punishment for each of the sins. And although Dante probably takes a delight that we feel as readers in inventing these punishments, what I think he’s really doing is showing us what something like Lust really looks like when you strip away the kind of veneer of it, the pleasure of it, the attractive element of it. We see, well it’s actually just being led around, pushed around, without using reason, giving yourself over to something. It’s the loss of the good of the intellect.
So I think the Inferno is about seeing our ignorance of sin and coming to face it, the Purgatorio is about coming to a kind of awareness and counteracting it in an active way, and then the Paradiso is about the contemplation of the good that is then gained when we’re rightly oriented toward it. So there’s this real trajectory.
That’s one way. The second way, which I can say more briefly, is in the Inferno, the great surprise, as your readers have discovered, is when you get down to the very bottom, you think, “oh, we’re getting deeper and deeper and I can’t wait til we meet this great Lucifer figure,” and we have in mind something like Milton’s Lucifer in Paradise Lost, the kind of motorcycle jacket wearing bad boy who we all want to be like secretly, but no, Dante gives us this totally different image. This horrific parody that is stuck in this ice of its own making, it's a self paralyzed parody of the divine and it’s impotent and static and pathetic. You look and then you move on and you don’t even spend the whole canto on him, in fact, he turns into a ladder that you climb out on, it’s astonishing. So Inferno is a place of eternal stasis, it’s being stuck in what Peter Hawkins, another great Dante scholar, calls compulsion repetition: you just keep doing the same thing over and over again.
Jump ahead to Paradiso, and what you have is a different kind of eternity, not the eternity of stasis, but the eternity of the dynamism of the self dance of the divine. But it’s been accomplished, so the drama of the Paradiso for us as readers is how do you say what’s beyond saying? There was the drama for Dante. How do I write what is beyond human language? It’s also the drama of a kind of ever increasing joy, but it’s already been accomplished. But Purgatorio is actually a place that measures progress of time, in Purgatorio you have the rising and the setting of the sun, you have mornings and evenings, you have a measurement by way of time and how you progress through it. I think the Purgatorio is a place of radical dynamism, because it's a place of transformation or change. The Purgatorio is a really temporal canticle, and it’s one I think that Dante secretly loved the most, because it was the place that can most tell us how to live our lives now.
Lisa: It’s with that willingness too, that’s what I feel going through this, is that it’s the same sin, but it’s the willingness to purge it, and I find that so beautiful.
Paul Camacho: As a canticle, if I were to recommend reading only one, it would be the Purgatorio.
Lisa: Dante falls into many categories, as we were saying: literature, philosophy, and theology. It’s also a very religious journey. How do you approach this kind of journey and the willingness to change in the Purgatorio to readers who are not coming to this text from a religious background, or even coming to it being cynical about the church, coming to it saying “ok, I see that, but that’s not applicable to me.” Do you encounter that?
Paul Camacho: I’m always struck when I ask my students at the end of every year what their favorite text was, and they always say that it was the Divine Comedy. My students are a mix of Christians, other faiths, with others who are not really religious. I think that while Dante clearly is himself Catholic, one of the both delights and kind of astonishing things to first time readers of the Comedy is just how critical he was of the historical and political institution of the church. We’ve become, unfortunately, very used to scandals of institutions of all kinds but especially the Christian institutions and the hypocrisy of it. But this is nothing new, and Dante’s approach is something that I think I appreciate and share, which is that a genuine love for something is to call it again to be true to what it really is, or should be, or proclaims to be, rather than to discard it entirely.
Lisa: So it’s not a call to tear down that which isn’t working, it’s to transform that which isn’t working, and that you yourself can take what that institution represents, and internalize it, transform it.
Paul Camacho: I think that’s right. It’s also the case that Dante aspires to write something that’s for all of us insofar as we’re human beings. And he is convicted by it, he is convinced of it, it’s a matter of lived faith for him. That God became an incarnate person, that the mother of that incarnate God is a mediating and loving and real maternal force in his life, that beauty and virtue are gifts that are given that exceed us, that sin is a reality, that we harm one another willingly and knowingly and that is something that does damage not only to our communities and our soul, but also wounds against the origin of the good that was given to us, and that there is also a contravening force that theologically is called grace but that we might call a gift or beauty or truth that also is at work in the world and in ourselves that we don’t originate and we don’t create, but that we respond to and that the task of a human life is to align ourselves to.
That’s his vision of the world that he gives us. But he also thinks so much of what he would call pagan wisdom, pre-Christian wisdom, and Jewish wisdom, there are also Islamic philosophers and theologians that show up in the text. These, insofar as something moves us toward what is true or good or beautiful, are part of a revelation in both the lower “r” sense, and also in the upper “R” sense. He delights in upending our assumptions about who should be saved and who should be damned. There are astonishing people who will show up in Paradiso, his political enemies show up in the Purgatorio as the first to be saved, and then popes and bishops and supposed heroes, and even his own teachers, are in levels of hell; that’s a daring and startling thing to do, but I think he’s reminding us of the universal aspect of being a human being. In his theological language he would call it sin and grace, but that we could also call something like self-deception, self-harm, and violence, or also gifts and goodness and beauty and love.
Lisa: I do think people are able to dive into it philosophically, as you said, but I did want to mention that aspect for the people that might step back a little bit from the religious aspect of it, but it is a more universal poem.
Paul Camacho: There’s one other thing I meant to say, so thanks for saying that, because what I tell my students is that when we read modern texts or modern novels, the danger in only reading contemporary or modern things is that it’s presenting to us the very air that we breathe, the water that we swim in, so we take for granted a lot of the assumptions because we share those assumptions.
Lisa: Those worldviews, we don’t even know that we have them.
Paul Camacho: The great gift of reading ancient texts, if we read them sympathetically and with an open mind, is precisely because they might differ from us in their assumptions and their working uses, that then they can call us to reflect on. ‘Well why don’t I share that assumption,’ and ‘What is it that Dante knows that I don’t know,’ and ‘What do I know that he doesn’t know?’ Then there’s this possibility of an incredible dialogue that can open precisely because Dante was situated in a particular time and place, and holds convictions that we may or may not hold, or that he expresses in a way that is very different from the way that we do, even if we are for example Roman Catholic as he was.
This is part one of our longer conversation; part two will be published next week.
The four levels of allegorical interpretation are literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.