Commentary Par XIV 61-66

The twenty-four souls in the first two circles, moved by Solomon's words, show their desire to put on their resurrected flesh, and perhaps for the same result for all those other saved souls whom they love.

The reader who believes that Dante is not sympathetic to our physical selves will have to acknowledge that this passage establishes his credibility as a human being who, like Solomon, accepts the fact of our corporeal existence and finds it good.  For Dante's view of the resurrected body, see Jacoff (Jaco.2000.1).  See also Bynum (Bynu.1995.1), pp. 291-305.  And see Picone (Pico.2002.4), p. 212-13, n. 21, for bibliography of some European contributions on this subject.  More recently Wei Wei Yeo has contributed an essay (Yeo.2006.1) in which she reflects upon recent work on the increasingly popular question of 'the body in Dante.'  One has a certain sense that she and some of her precursors do not understand that the importance of the body in this poem is in part a natural concomitance of its self-presentation as history (rather than as fable).  This is not to suggest that it fails to be an important concern for Dante (nothing could be farther from the truth), but that some of its presence is driven by more pressing concerns.  Had Dante remained in the allegorical mode of the first three treatises of Convivio, there would have been little or no such attention in the resultant work.  Such a perception, mirroring the importance of an incarnational poetic in both Vita nuova and Commedia, is a central position advanced by Erich Auerbach from his first pages dedicated to Dante (in his Dante, Poet of the Secular World [{Auer.1929.1]}) through his last ('Sermo humilis' [{Auer.1958}]).  Yeo, whose bibliographical recognition of important antecessors is not ungenerous, does not mention Auerbach's work.