Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise

These are outlines to my multi-volume study of peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri. Parts of this work are currently being edited in preparation for publication by the Fralerighe Press, Rome, under the title Dante's Politics of Love. Further details here

Dante Integral

These are the outlines to my Dante studies.

Ciaran Carson writes that we rarely, if ever, get a glimpse of the Dante envisioned by the great Russian poet Mandelstam:

"If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if all the paintings of all the schools and the great masters were suddenly to break loose from their hooks, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the rooms with a Futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of colour, we would then have something resembling Dante's Commedia."

- Osip Mandelstam

I have written that very thing. The work I have produced is a beautiful madness, immense but in need of editing. I have the vision in my head, and it coheres in its truth. But it needs further work. Since all things are interconnected, they are present and visible at once to me. I suspect that the work I have in mind can be accomplished only by mathematicians, musicians, and poets. But God, like Love, has no need of proof. So I write with enthusiasm, in the true meaning of that word.

Dante is worth the effort. I have read all manner of works, reaching a level of expertise with respect to the work of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Rousseau, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Wittgenstein, Habermas and many more. These thinkers offer plenty and can take us far. But always, at some point, I reach a limit beyond which these thinkers cannot, or will not, go. At that point, thinking negates and undercuts itself, or simply has nothing more to say (on the important things on which reason can say nothing meaningful). Dante gives us more – he has the ability to say the unsayable, even if he doesn’t always 'say' it in words. Dante conveys the meanings and, most importantly, incites the thoughts, the yearning, and the seeking. Dante understood the Thomist lesson that the slenderest knowledge of the highest things is worth more than the most certain knowledge of the lesser things. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that ‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.’ Dante walks that walk and invites us to follow with faith and moral courage/imagination.

The entire argument I set out here is framed in terms of a musical model – numbers, music, metaphysics, morals – emphasising harmony as an attunement, the ordering of the world on the basis of proper relationships between all its parts. We should have known all along that God was just an old song and dance man! The simple-complex theme that drives the work is one of diverse elements being rendered concordant within an overarching and orienting oneness. Such diversity proceeds in accord with a cohering unitarian principle, thus avoiding tendencies to division and dissolution. That’s the foundational first volume on Dante’s musical model – the sweet symphony of Paradise. Dante gives us a unity without a repressive uniformity, a diversity without an unliveable division.

The volume that is currently being edited for publication is volume 2, Dante's Politics of Love. This volume establishes the conditions for a politics of love and friendship. Amity. This advances a politics and ethics that is premised on the innate sociability and rationality of human beings, qualities which are incited within the being of each and all by their wonder at the world without. Cleaving to the Love that is without end serves to satisfy the profound longing for meaning, truth, and belonging shared by all.

The central theme of this volume is unfolded around the journey from loss and separation in the ‘dark wood’ of the anti-social Hell to homecoming in the Eternal Rose with the golden heart. The journey from the dark wood to the Eternal Rose with the golden heart is unfolded around the tripartite scheme of disconnection, reconnection, and ultimate connection as a communion of beings, bodies, and souls. The argument shows the various ways in which Dante infuses the institutional framework (forms of contract, communion, and community) with a social and moral infrastructure in order to establish the authoritative framework of a just rule which enfolds, protects, and nourishes civic community. The result is global governance which is grounded in the restoration of social proximity, the recovery of citizenly experience, small-scale practical reasoning and love of home and place. The local and global are thus established on a continuum in accordance with ascending associative purpose. Public life is established as a communion of hearts.

The ideal is supported by a muscular social and moral infrastructure, establishing social connection and civic responsibility within a habitus in which the virtues can be known, acquired, and exercised. Instead of pious wishes based on empty ideals, the end is attached to its practical means of realisation. Most significantly there is an emphasis on human agency, practice, and responsibility. There is a character-forming culture of discipline, a paideia, a civic and moral education. There is an emphasis on the moral and intellectual virtues as qualities for living well and flourishing. There is also a systematic critique of the vices. In short, I combine the institutional framework of the common peace with the moral and social infrastructure that enables individuals to practice the way of peace.

Lewis Mumford recalls that when he asked Ananda Coomaraswamy to define the three gunas (qualities) described in the Bhagavad-Gita, "he replied with illustrative passages from Dante's Divine Comedy." (Mumford The Transformations of Man 1957 ch 5 p 83). The comparison makes it clear that the virtues are the qualities that human beings need in order to live well. This is not the moralism that critics often mistakenly allege but the precise opposite, an ethics that is embedded in social practices and modes of conduct, things that people do rather than orders and instructions they obey.

Volume 3, Dante and Rational Freedom, develops Dante in terms of a philosophical understanding and sociological application of ‘rational freedom.’ Here, I relate Dante’s ideas of an infernal production to the alienation thesis of Marx and the rationalisation thesis of Weber. I also set Dante’s journey to God in the context of Nietzsche’s ‘death of God.’ I also examine attempts to found ethics and politics on Nature. As against the God/Nature of Einstein and Spinoza, unfolding harmoniously in indifference to human affairs, I show why the personal God, the God of Love and human relationships, is essential.

Volume 4, Dante Dialogues: Walking and Talking with Dante, discusses the various ways in which Dante has been regarded since his death, examining both public and personal engagements with the poet. This volume is an entertaining Dante dialogue with a remarkable diversity of Dantista over the years, including Oscar Wilde, poet Osip Mandelstam, Primo Levi on how Dante helped him survive the concentration camps, up to Dante as an inspiration for the black civil rights movement in the USA. There is not only a Dante for every age, but a Dante for every person. 700 years after the death of the peerless poet-philosopher, Dante Alighieri continues to light the way.

In these volumes I have sought to convey what Dante sees and what Dante hears - the inner music that draws us to harmony as an attunement and the movement that ends in rest, accenting the awareness of reality that grows on the pilgrim journey.

Dante's journey is one of reconnection, renewal, restoration, and rebirth.

"Here from the dead let poetry rise up ..." (Dante, Comedy, Purg 1: 7).

Although the individuals that Dante meets in the afterlife are technically disembodied spirits - Dante is the only flesh and blood character in The Comedy - they address the poet as distinct, fully human, individuals. In fact, these shades reveal themselves with a vitality and purity of being only possible because the dross has been purged from them to leave only the essential character. Exactly two decades ago I submitted my PhD thesis on Marx and the 'truly human society,' the realized society of realized individuals as social beings. It's a worthy ideal. But it depends on the transcendent source and end that Dante establishes for its realisation. Without that, any purely human ideal cannot but curve inwards upon itself. Dante's 'trasumanar' points to the necessary spiritual dimension in the realisation of that ideal of humanity living as one.

The Comedy is shot through with the movement of potentiality becoming actuality, bringing individual souls to vivid life as participant pilgrims who body-forth essential truth in their innermost individuality.

Of these shades/souls, Auerbach writes that "though the concrete data of their lives and the atmosphere of their personalities are drawn from their former existences on earth, they manifest them here with a completeness, a concentration, an actuality, which they seldom achieved during their term on earth and assuredly never revealed to anyone else." What's more, "The passion, which, either from diffidence or from lack of occasion to speak, tends in temporal existence to hide, bursts forth here, all in one piece, as though moved by the awareness that this is its one and only opportunity to express itself."

Dante is the poet of a self-actualisation bounded only by the Will in which we find eternal peace.

Erich Auerbach described Dante as a poet of the secular world, the first great realist author, and perhaps the greatest of all. In Auerbach's words, Dante was the first to configure "man, not as a remote legendary hero, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness; and in that he has been followed by all subsequent portrayers of man, regardless of whether they treated a historical or a mythical or a religious subject, for after Dante myth and legend also became history." (Dante: Poet of the Secular World.)

I think that this is an important half truth, and the other half of the truth is that Dante is even greater than that. But it's that other half that people may struggle most to accept. People tend to focus on the Inferno, because it is comprehensible and realistic in the sense of being familiar. The fact is, though, is that it is the Heavenly Paradiso that is truly real, bringing us to ultimate reality and pouring out the truths that people need like divine rain. The Paradiso is resplendent, blinding, something that requires the preparation of vision through the discipline of the Purgatorial Mountain.

Dante continues to make us see that individual destiny isn't meaningless, but is significant, both tragic but ultimately - and here is the transcendent hope that is all-important - comedic. A happy ending to our lives is possible. The livelier minds of the modern age will repudiate this - which is why it stands in need of the whole message. Putting two half truths together will never form the whole truth: you need to take the whole in digestible parts presented as the one process.

Dante is far more than a dreamy mystic or a versifying schoolman. He truly is a "poet of the secular world," of our fallen Earthly realm where people laugh and conspire, love and hate, sin and triumph over sin. But he is a mystic with a moral all the same. A man of reason and faith - he is rational as far as reason will go, which is almost to the end in Dante. Lost and mired in the dark abyss of politics, we struggle to hear and respond to the transcendent call of the Beautiful, the music that brings us to attunement. There's a musical model running through this vision, establishing the psychic, social, and institutional conditions for doing politics well, expressing the insight that the Beautiful is the supreme political category for the way it unites emotion and reason and thereby lights the way for the heart to follow.

There is no stoic indifference to life's vicissitudes here. Dante impels each of us to engage intensely with the issues and conflicts of this world, with a view to a greater reconciliation. All life burns in the pages of Dante, his Comedy is a human comedy, with individuals brought to life on the page with an anguished, yearning, keening, heart-piercing reality. Marx understated when he referred to Dante as 'the great Florentine.'

In these volumes I go with what Dante sees and with what Dante hears, taking us to an ultimate reality that is accessible to all people:

“Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty – if we don’t understand, we just stay listening to the sound, and it’s like hearing music."

- Roberto Benigni

This is the musical model that draws all things together in sweet harmony. Dante gives us both unity and diversity - the poem ends on a plural - the stars. The sheer diversity of the characters and personalities in the Commedia is breath-taking, rivalled only by the whole of Shakespeare laid end to end. Dante's verse is sharp and clear, zeroing-in relentlessly on experience at ever greater levels.

How real do people want it? Dante deals with the conundrum that the more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is. Dante thus attempts to convey through language a message that ultimately transcends language.

From personal experience, a unique, contingent, and ephemeral this-worldliness expands into the universe to become 'an immutable vision of reality in general, earthly particularity held fast in the mirror of a timeless eye.' (Auerbach).

A commentator writes 'it should be evident that Erich Auerbach, despite his sometimes abstract Germanic prose and commanding scholarship, is also writing straight from the heart.' I rather like that description. I write a lot on the ecology of the human heart in my Dante book, the motivational and transformative force of true poetry.

Dante's Ecology of the Heart: The Topos of the Heart in the Work of Dante Alighieri

But there is a moral and philosophical weight to The Comedy which modern ears might struggle to understand, let alone accept. Dante emphasises the human likeness to God. The structure of the poem and the richness of its dramatis personae, which establish its character as a summa vitae humanae, reveal the direct influence of the endlessly surprising St. Thomas Aquinas. As I argued in my book Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity, Aquinas establishes individuality and diversity as a theological tenet. We are worlds away from drab uniformity and sterile homogeneity here. Since the world was made in God's image, it follows that no one species of created things is adequate to reflect the likeness of God in itself, not even the supposedly exalted human species. Aquinas argues that all species are needed to perfect God's vision.

In terms of The Comedy as a 'human comedy,' every soul possesses its own particular, gradually acquired habitus, "an enduring disposition which enriches and modifies the substance; it is the residuum in man's soul of his soul's history; for every action, every exertion of the will toward its goal leaves behind a trace, and the modification of the soul through its actions is the habitus. In the Thomist psychology diversities of habitus account for the diversity of human characters; it is the habitus which determines how each empirical man will realize his essence. It illumines the relations between the soul and its acts. But the habitus only reveals itself over time. As a result, no matter what one's precise earthly station, each human being must necessarily be a dramatic hero."

I would emphasise that line from Auerbach - the ideal habitus for human flourishing only reveals itself in time and place, "it is the habitus which determines how each empirical man will realize his essence." That view is not a world away from the truly human society pursued by Marx, at least not in the way I have examined Marx over the years, in terms of the commitment to a truly socialised society grounded in rational freedom and a normative essentialism.

In fine, "reality and superhuman will, order and compelling authority" generate the substance of the Commedia's style."

Despite metaphysical assumptions and theological and political commitments that are not shared by the modern age – and in large part are incomprehensible to the modern age – Dante still stands at the summit of art and civilization, raising all who make their way through his ‘sacred poem’ to an ecstatic vision of wisdom and beauty.

“Thus in truth the Comedy is a picture of earthly life. The human world in all its breadth and depth is gathered into the structure of the hereafter and there it stands: complete, unfalsified, yet encompassed in an eternal order; the confusion of earthly affairs is not concealed or attenuated or immaterialized, but preserved in full evidence and grounded in a plan which embraces it and raises it above all contingency. Doctrine and fantasy, history and myth are woven into an almost inextricable skein.... Once one has succeeded in surveying the whole, the hundred cantos, with their radiant terza rima, their perpetual binding and loosing, reveal the dreamlike lightness and remoteness of a perfection that seems to hover over us like a dance of unearthly figures.”

Dante's subject-matter in the Paradiso is precisely the kind of truth which can never be fully accessible to reason. He is not, therefore, denying reason, but issuing a caution to us to be on our guard against making false claims to truth or against others who do by way of a rational projection of nature, reality, and necessity. That is not reason but rationalisation.

By faith, Dante participates in the living truth (conoscenza viva) of the being of the world. This draws Dante away from the sea of wrongful love and sets him in the direction of rightful love so that he might live in hope to live in the Garden of the World. Dante thus refers to God as the “Everlasting Gardener,” the “leaves enleaving all” in the Eternal Garden as he enumerates the blessings by which God has manifested His goodness:

Thus I began again: “My charity

results from all those things whose bite can bring

the heart to turn to God; the world’s existence

and mine, the death that He sustained that I

might live, and that which is the hope of all

believers, as it is my hope, together

with living knowledge I have spoken of—

these drew me from the sea of twisted love

and set me on the shore of the right love.

The leaves enleaving all the garden of

the Everlasting Gardener, I love

according to the good He gave to them.”

Par 26: 55-66

The translation that Barbara Reynolds gives of the last verse yields the appealing image of God as the Everlasting Gardener: "Thus through the garden of the world I rove, enamoured of its leaves in measure solely as God the Gardener nurtures them above."

From above, God the Eternal Gardener measures and nurtures the leaves of the Garden of the World. The "living truth" is the "living consciousness," the self-conscious awareness of Love. Again, Dante gives us not a theoretical concept, an abstraction, but a tangible image: Faith is a flame, Hope is refreshing rain, and Love unites Heaven and Earth and heaven in the Everlasting Garden.

Dante is the poet of that God. Dante is the endless poet, the poet for all seasons, the poet of the Endless Love that moves all things. I have never come close to reaching the end of Dante, despite having read him a long time now. His lines are packed with meaning, expanding exponentially as soon as you make the attempt to unfold them, exposing worlds within worlds. He contains too much to be summarised. Only a poet could compass so much and yet still transcend it all, and then only a poet of genius. Dante had already written many original works before he wrote "The Comedy." He possessed a vast knowledge but, more than that, a vision and a concern to convey all that he knew. His medium was poetry. "The Comedy" is a work of genius, dialogic and not didactic.

Why should you read Dante?

Because all human life is in there, both the good and the bad. Because he evades the cul-de-sacs of seductive visions of "beyond good and evil." We all tend to think of ourselves as being with the angels, whilst our enemies are with the devils. Dante cautions us to think again. He is a tough guy with a beautiful soul. He has the power of discernment. Dante doesn't shirk the hard questions and doesn’t fudge the often harder answers. Much that he says has me drawing breath, knowing how hard a sell such things are in an age when individuals reserve to themselves the right to determine the good as they see fit – we live in an age in which there no good and evil, merely arbitrary likes and dislikes without reference to objective criteria and transcendent standards of evaluation. It is an age of self-cancellation, with no good reason for anyone to be persuaded by the myriad goods and gods others may choose and follow. 'Whatever created god gets you out to act for the good,' a kindly atheist friend knowingly told me when I expressed a belief in God. I responded that as soon as the truth is out that all values are mere human self-creations, then there is no good reason for anyone to follow any good except their own. Not action but the paralysis of self-cancellation follows down that route. His mocking tone was easily turned against him. The problem with the modern age is not that it lacks moral theories, it has plenty of them. The problem is that without objective grounds and transcendent standards, there are no good reasons to take any of these theories seriously. Opinions divide according to personal taste. My kindly friend argues that science is sufficient. He is wrong. Scientific knowledge and technological know-how lack the appetitive qualities of true virtue; they give us the ability to act but they do not make us want to act, they lack motivational force. Hence if we are reduced to an ethics that is no more than self-created values, then we are in an impasse. I have no reason to respect your good/god and you have no reason to respect mine. Such a world ends in self-cancellation.

Dante inhabits another moral universe entirely. That universe is outdated, say his critics. Earlier this year, one scholar praised Shakespeare as far superior to Dante on account of his relativist morality being “more modern.” And the result of that morality is? That morality is rootless hence fruitless. I take that view apart in Dante and Shakespeare and in the book I wrote on Dante in 2013, Dante’s Enamoured Mind.

Dante sees the ugliness, the sordidness, and the depravity, the worst that human beings can be. He sees that the soul, which is made quick to love and respond to beauty, is also quick to attach itself to the wrong objects and lazily fall into error through habituation. That's why we need to read Dante today. Because he sees the need for guidance, the need for the happy habitus in which we can know, learn, acquire, internalize, and exercise the virtues. Because he rescues the beauty in the Creation and returns us to Being.

And if you want to know what that Love refers to and entails – the awesome doctrine that nothing escapes Love – then you will have to read my forthcoming book on Dante, Dante’s Politics of Love. Upcoming publication at Fralerighe, details here. This is the best book I have ever written and by far and away the most important.

A short outline of my masterpiece Dante: From the Dark Wood to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold

My book on Dante is for those who want to go beyond banalities and generalities and learn more about the moving and the turning of the universe, but most importantly of the human beings in it, human beings as co-creative agents in a ceaselessly creative universe motivated by Love. Dante is the man who plunges to the depths and soars to the heights in order to touch the roots of a universe animated by the Greatest Love of all. The terrifying but ultimately inspiring message of Dante’s work is that there is no escaping Love.

“Here my exalted vision lost its power. But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving with an even motion, were turning with the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”

Dante Alighieri, The Comedy, Paradiso 33: 142-145

A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.

I read these lines for the first time in Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars from 1927. (I have a very old and treasured copy). I thought them the greatest lines ever written. I still do; they pack a wealth of meaning and significance, for those who are serious in overcoming the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity in a way that avoids diminishing agency, consciousness, will, and creative human praxis in face of an impassive, impersonal, and indifferent reality. The whole passage revolves on the verb ‘turning,’ denoting an affective power that moves a physical universe with moral force. We live within a ceaselessly creative and participatory universe, one animated by a very particular kind of Love. Here’s the revolution I support. And there’s nothing fuzzy about this Love. It entails a hard but liberating discipline in light of a proper understanding of the real world.

We should note that the concordance of diverse elements in oneness that Dante celebrates ends on the plural of "the stars." Dante's unity is not a repressive uniformity characterised by homogeneity. Individuals do not lose their identities as they become part of a greater whole. Dante presents us not with a sterile uniformity and empty universalism but a genuine collectivity premised on the moral agency of each composing the all. Dante explains this very clearly with respect to the eagle (standing for Justice) in the Heaven of Jupiter, whose aquiline form is made up of many souls: whenever the eagle says “I” and “mine” it means “we” and “ours.” Dante sees a huge eagle comprising the great multitude of individual souls and hears it speak with a single communal voice:

I saw and also heard the beak speaking,

and the voice sounding both I and mine,

when logically it was we and ours.

Par 19: 10–12

This is the image of Paradise as the realisation of community with differentiation. Dante’s journey from the anti-society to the truly human society encourages us to understand how it feels to be deprived of communal relations, to be isolated in the midst of others, to be drawn into antagonistic relation to others. Such a fragmented society is not a society at all but an anti-society which perpetuates itself by fostering anti-social attitudes and behaviour in the name of survival in the power game. This is the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ as a universal isolation, competition, and antagonism. Against this, Dante’s journey encourages us to socialize and internalize connection so that citizens in fragmented communities could come to work together so as to create and nurture the communal bonds and ties that would enable them to live together in peace and harmony. Society can be a hell or a heaven for its citizens, and determining which depends on the means and methods by which connection, communication, and community comes to be impaired or enhanced. Dante’s poetry as a moral art and political practice is one such method.

I write on Purgatory as the Mutual Aid society, the place where the souls learn the value and joy of cooperation. In Purgatory, the souls provide moral and social support for one another as they work together toward a common end. They still suffer, but now they suffer together, hopeful in the knowledge that the pain of purgation is also an education and a healing. They know that in making themselves better, they make their community better too; in helping themselves, they help others.

I note that the word "disaster" means to be without stars; note how Dante returns us to a place where we can once again see the stars, beyond the diabolism of infernal separation; note the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes, sustains, and moves all; note the appetitive quality; note the tempering of the even motion of a world in tune; note the conjoining of physical and moral power, the attunement; note that we are enjoined to be God’s partners in Creation. That was always the plan, before boundaries were transgressed by the misuse of moral agency, the misuse of free will which Dante praises as God’s ‘greatest gift’ to us.

In these volumes I defend certain views that the liveliest minds of this age have long since repudiated and have determined never to return. The liveliest minds of Dante’s age and before had also repudiated these views. There is some suggestion that Dante himself had been an Epicurean and philosophical materialist in the first stage of his life. I trace the evolution of his thought in relation to such doctrines. It is a journey that I have myself travelled. Long before the great visionary William Blake was writing of “the lost Travellers Dream under the Hill,” Dante was taking us on that journey back to Love. It’s a harrowing journey at times. It is a journey of self-examination, challenging us with questions that we may prefer to avoid. Dante lived in an age of moral uncertainty, political violence, collapsing assumptions, and failing institutions, as we do too. Dante saw his own personal exile as a general condition, as human beings struggled to feel at home in a world that was becoming alien to them. This estrangement made for agony bit also an ever deeper meditation on the causes of human misery and the conditions of human happiness.

Committed as he was to the welfare not only of his contemporaries but of those “who will deem this time ancient,” Dante gave us a discourse that overarches the centuries, a discourse confirming him in his status as the universal poet, not merely as a cultural icon, but as a fellow traveller on the journey home.

I have written too much in these volumes for me to neatly summarise. So I shall just select one theme and one passage and wrap it up here. Referring back to William Blake’s ‘Lost Traveller,’ Dante is for those who want to know more about existential crisis, and know more deeply. In volume 4: Walking and Talking with Dante: The Endless Love on the Unending Road I show that such a view expresses two visions of paradise, the 'lost paradise' of our origins and the 'found paradise' of our destination. With a memory of our beginning and a glimpse of our end, life's pilgrim journey is to move from the one to other in a story of Exodus, Exile, and Homecoming. The journey was called "the Way" in the Middle Ages. The human being was seen as homo viator, the itinerant man on a journey, the voyager or traveller. Human beings were conceived as people on a journey, on the way, each travelling in the hope to become homo comprehensor, the one who has arrived at the point where all desires are known and fulfilled. This is Heaven. Dante thus emerges as an existentialist whose metaphysics of hope gives us a prodigious personal insight on ‘man on the way,’ informing and inspiring our own pilgrimages in hope. Such an existential philosophy is concerned not with the technical problems of physical existence; these are merely surface manifestations of problems that lie deeper in the human condition. Dante addresses existential questions directly to this condition, tapping the sources of hope within conditions of despair, recovering the transcendent values upon which we depend beyond the lack of stability on the surface. In The Comedy, he is a dramatist of the soul as well as a poet-philosopher, going far beyond the empty platitudes of contemporary moral language to the texture of human experience to reveal the endurance of living truths that are as essential to the health and sustainability of our contemporary life as they were to our ancestors, truths which are always capable of being rediscovered and recovered and made the basis of a viable practice.” ‘la infinita via,’ which is something which is beyond our normal human ken. (Purg 3: 34-39).

If I had to put it simply, in one line, I’d remind people who are lost in the dark wood that Dante looks up. We get lost when we keep looking down at the things immediately before us, the things we know and which are familiar, failing to see the truth, the reality, the Love, the source and end of all things that lies beyond. Dante continues to light the way.

Everything depends on that "turning" as reunion, the culmination of a process of restoration and healing. The Inferno is all about separation. Dante emphasizes the processes in which human beings become separated from each other, from themselves, from nature and, ultimately, from God, the key estrangement from which all the other estrangements follow. Central to all of this is the idea of separation as diabolic, as the artificial-infernal destruction of the natural-lawful unity which causes suffering, and may well lead to Hell on Earth.

The diabolic spirit imposes separation on the world and brings conflict, suffering and a seemingly endless pain (which is actually endless in Hell, a realm of the damned cut off from all hope) since it is the unnatural state of being. This is where the notion of an originary politics enters. Politics is about dissensus and disagreement, the raising of alternate platforms and the exchange of different views and voices in search of common agreement. But it is more. This politics – which was known as High Politics when I studied it at university – or real politics – is enfolded within an originary politics. "The political," then, is more than the politics of the “ins” and the “outs” forever fighting out their unwinnable zero-sum wars to common ruination, aiming to claim the power to govern others in a still divided and ultimately destroyed world. This is politics as an endless fight and conflict, a view familiar to Hobbesian materialists and their tragic vision of life as the “war of all against all” – one accumulates power or gets accumulated by power. This is a condition of estrangement and division. The endless political fight of the contemporary age is, at base, an infernal anti-politics in contradistinction to an originary politics, a diabolic inversion of true politics as creative self-actualisation. That genuine politics proceeds within a natural-lawful unity, which Dante openly calls God's divine plan for Justice. When I argue (through Dante) that we should be establishing the moral, social, and spiritual conditions for doing politics well, as against merely putting a dog in the fight (politics as separation based on incommensurate values), this entails bringing politics as practised back in touch with its originary moral force. Achieve this, and we move beyond separation as diabolic and politics as infernal as the spirit of unity brings vitality, peace and harmony. This Highest Love is the spiritual principle of love and unity which, so long as we align with it and thereby come back within its fold, is the remedy to separation, bringing healing to the world. The diabolic principle separates people on the social level, separating individuals from their senses of belonging, community, and meaning, having them alienate their lives and pursue desire in a market place. Human beings as social beings then split against each other according to self- and sectional interest, identity, and class, the diabolic spirit impelling the members of society to fight each other rather than realize and celebrate their legitimate difference and uniqueness as one. This is separation as the dissolution of the social unity which human beings, as social beings, require to actualize themselves.

Everywhere I look I see divisions, often as attempts to correct divisions: children vs adults, men vs women, black vs white, but as with class, it takes more than a general appeal to “everyone” and banal celebrations of “love” to overcome division. How to overcome division without inverting it and reinforcing it is one of the trickiest problems in politics. It is a problem that the contemporary age is failing spectacularly on.

There is a theme of diabolic inversion running throughout my Dante book. It is a theme which is central to Dante. The Inferno is a diabolic parody of the Paradiso, centred on the estrangement of human beings from God, the Ground of all Being. This estrangement generates diabolic forms within the anti-community, where individuals and groups separate themselves – or more precisely are separated by alien forms of mediation – so as to misuse others to private ends.

The result of a self-seeking freedom of each in separation from all is that all become constrained and determined by external force. Think economic imperatives and crises, think the ‘externalities’ which impinge on all. We can locate the crisis in the climate system in these estranged relations. These crises all denote individuals as powerless beings before collective forces, in need of a politics of unity, a reunion so as to bring a voluntary self-conscious common force to bear upon involuntary collective impositions.

Where once there was unity and a common human family, the diabolic spirit creeps in, with some coming to see themselves as different to others, indeed as better than others, with interests to preserve and advance against those others. The common good is lost as individuals in their estrangement come to be obsessed by the diabolic spirit. People separate themselves from others and start to enrich themselves at the expense of others.

When you examine the infernal world, you will soon see the illness, the dis-ease, which comes from the natural-lawful originary politics, broken and divided by those obsessed by the diabolic spirit, separating from others, using politics to enforce their separate interests, and making the society of each and all suffer the infernal consequences. Reunion and healing, being "turned" by the Greater Love. That's the revolution I support, revolution as attunement to the divine music.

I write on Einstein’s God of Spinoza – I systematically take it apart as only half a God, the easiest and less interesting half. Dante reinstates the God of Love and personal relationships. Lose that, and you will soon be without stars. Simple version – get in tune. Dante makes Love the ultimate political category, lighting the way to truth and goodness and inviting the heart to follow. Dante's Comedy is a journey from cacophony to monophony to polyphony, a story of reconnection, restoration, and renewal.

I can write forever on Dante, for he is the endless poet. But I had better be brief. People like it short. “Love makes the world go round.”

And on that note, I shall finish giving the rationale and encourage people to investigate the links to the progression of my work on Dante since 2017.

The first two links here give a break-down of the contents of the various volumes :

Dante Integral

https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/dante-integral

Dante's Sweet Symphony - vol 1 music

https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/dante-s-sweet-symphony-of-paradise-1

From the Dark Wood to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold

Dante and Shakespeare

https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/dante-and-shakespeare

Dante and Marx

https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/2016/10/26/dante-and-marx

Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise

https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/2020/04/05/dantes-sweet-symphony-of-paradise