The Soul's Tangibility in Dante's Commedia

Abstract

Dante's Commedia presents a striking and persistent inconsistency in the treatment of the soul's tangibility across its three canticles. Infernal shades can be stepped on, struck, and clung to, while purgatorial souls sometimes prove intangible and at other times embrace one another successfully, and the blessed in Paradise appear not as bodies but as lights. Existing scholarship has attempted to explain these apparent contradictions through theological ambiguity, dramaturgical exigency, or the linear purification of sin, yet no study has offered a systematic account of the conditions under which touch is permitted or withheld in the afterlife. This paper argues that tangibility in the Commedia functions as a deliberate narrative device whose role shifts according to the theological and poetic requirements of each cosmic realm. Drawing on an approach that treats bodily perception as a locus of meaning-making, scenes involving touch across Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are analyzed to reconstruct its narrative purpose. The analysis reveals a functional-differential model: in Inferno, tangibility materializes sin as a perceptible consequence and an instrument of exposure; in Purgatorio, touch is selectively deployed to correct desire, construct communal identity, and reorient love toward its proper end; in Paradiso, the apparatus of touch is surpassed as relationships are expressed through light and vision, though the soul's longing for the resurrection body affirms the enduring significance of embodiment. This model reframes the Commedia's textual contradictions as deliberate articulations of Dante's theological poetics, demonstrating that what changes across the three canticles is the nature of the relationship that touch enacts.