Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise
I have been working on this book since February 2017. It started as an article on Dante and music as I embarked on my rehabilitation classes after a spell in hospital. Dante has always been an unfailing guide for me, so I read and wrote for pleasure. And as I continued, Dante's music started to suggest other things. I started to develop the theme a little further. There is a point and a purpose to the inner music in Dante's 'sacred poem.' I've written a lot of words since the 1990s, maybe far too many words. The greatest books are never the ones that are finished and have the final say. There is no final say, and the best books are unfinishable; they leave something over for you to do. I have never thought that Dante gives us a complete book. He takes us to Paradise in order to return us to Earth again, and begin the journey anew. For years now I have expressed the desire to one day write a beautiful book. This may be the one.
Contents:
The Internal Music of The Comedy and of All Things
Dante’s Sweet Symphony of Paradise The Internal Music of The Comedy and of All Things
Introduction: the right order of things ((Introduction)) 3 ((Dante and music)) 6 ((Music measures the relation to God)) 8 ((Objective reality and objective morality)) 10 ((The musical structure of The Comedy)) 18 ((The well-tempered harmony)) 19 ((The influence of music in exercising soulcare)) 24 ((Commercial Music and Soul Music - mechanical repetition as infernal)) 26 ((familiarity and vision – beyond realism)) 34
Philosophical and Religious influences on Dante 37 ((Plato)) 38 ((Aristotle)) 39 ((St. Augustine)) 42 ((Boethius)) 45
((Ancient and Religious theories of music - a discussion)) 47
Dante’s love of music 58 ((The structure of the musical transition in The Comedy)) 59 ((The musical anthropology of The Comedy))
((music and moral psychology)) 60 ((The music of the universe - the centrality of music to all things)) 61
The Centrality of Numbers 61
((ratio and proportion)) 62 ((Pythagoras)) 64 ((Plato)) 65 ((the Pythagorean tradition)) 66 ((numerology – St Augustine)) 68 ((Boethius)) 70 ((the virtues of numbers)) 71 ((Bonaventure)) 73 ((numerology in Dante)) 76 ((numerological thinking)) 78 ((The dangers of arid rationalism - physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim's case against abstract Platonism)) 80 ((Dante beyond numerology – innate love)) 88
The Comedy
((The Inferno – the world of anti-music)) 105 ((Purgatory)) 108 ((The limits of words)) 109 ((Casella’s song - the dangers of becoming absorbed in the sound of music to the neglect of its ends)) 112 ((the role of hymns in The Comedy)) 117 ((The mystic procession)) 123 ((The challenge of the Paradiso - vision beyond the immediate senses)) 125 ((The possibility of vision transcending senses)) 129 ((The sweet symphony of Paradise)) 131 ((The song and dance of Creation)) 133 ((The music that is beyond rational comprehension - the anarchic excess that evades enclosure by totalizing Reason)) 137 ((Beyond the limits of speech)) 140 ((Conclusion – the musical journey)) 158 ((Music as liquid light)) 160 ((The end of the poem – into the light – the failure of geometry)) 167 ((The spiritual centre of the universe – the end of Paradise)) 172
PARADISE AND LOVE 186
((Dante's heartleap - Love as the unifying force in the universe)) 186 ((Dante's conclusion: Love as the answer)) 196 ((The question: if love is the answer – then what is love?)) 197 ((conclusion)) 198
THE SACRED POEM – THE REAL AND THE RATIONAL 200
((The Comedy as a sacred poem beyond fiction – the real and the rational)) 200 ((The sacred poem – the real over the fictional)) 205 ((the impossibilities of the Paradiso)) 210 ((Wilde vs Beckett - touching the source of Dante's transcendent hope)) 223 ((Dante’s invention)) 225 ((Dante’s devotion to impossibility)) 227
((Paradise beyond Reason)) 229
The Danteum – Medievalism, the Hierarchical order and Fascism 231 ((The Danteum)) 236 ((The petrification of Paradise)) 241 ((The freezing of the music)) 244 ((Frozen music as the immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum as a world of form without love)) 246 ((Integrating rather than separating the two concepts of God)) 247
((The critique of Einstein's God of Spinoza)) 247 ((Putting the realms of fact and value together)) 248
A Creator God and/or Natural Creativity? 267
((The secret and the sacred – the impossibility of reinventing the sacred)) 287 ((The fulfilment of the soul’s desire – an eccentricity that is beyond control)) 347 ((The illusions of being in control and of being in charge – letting go of neurosis)) 360 ((Be still and know)) 383 ((The dancer and the dance as one – getting in tune)) 385
Unity and Diversity 394
((Unity and diversity)) 395 ((P.B. Shelley as a rewrite of Dante on unity and diversity)) 397 ((Unity through diversity)) 402 ((unity in diversity – the politics of the common good)) 404 ((functional order – differentiated power)) 408 ((functional order – the just society and love divine)) 416 ((Personal and collective responsibility)) 419
Rational Freedom 430
((Dante and Marx)) 430 ((Rational Freedom, Right Relationships, alienation and idolatry)) 467 ((Reason, Culture and Transcendent Truths)) 479 ((Culture, Power, and Truth)) 486
Freedom Rationalized and Mechanized 503
((Dante and the disenchanted world of Max Weber)) 503 ((The End of the World by Fire and Ice – the parallels between Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity)) 507 ((Dante - recovering purpose and meaning in the disenchanted world)) 529 ((Dante and Climate Accord)) 543 ((Beyond the empire of fact)) 555
Happy Ending 571
((The human comedy – overcoming existential crisis)) 571 ((Happiness depends on the choices we make, the ends we serve)) 574
Appendix – evidence of Dante’s internal music 575 References to Music 575 ((musical instruments)) 576 ((musical terms)) 577 ((hymns and psalms)) 577
((appendix on numerology)) 579 ((appendix on music and poetry)) 580 ((appendix – Dante websites)) 584
And these chapters below are among another couple of hundred pages to be added to the above, then edited, rewriitten and integrated:
Peace on Earth Law, the State and the International Community Perpetual Peace and government Osip Mandelstam on Dante and true authority Dante on One Government
Blake and Dante Dante and Averroes – the uncanonical Dante Dante and Mahler – the internal music
And there are plenty of other passages, texts, and essays I have hanging around on Dante. I have a beautiful piece on Chinese views of music, bells, and harmonious order which has to be fitted in somewhere.
I am encouraged by the extent to which further reading on this has confirmed my views. I have recently taken extensive notes from Francesco Ciabattoni's erudite Dante's Journey to Polyphony (2010). Whilst I was somewhat disappointed to come across this incredibly scholarly and detailed book after I had largely written my Dante book, I remain heartily encouraged by the fact that many of the key points made in this learned and critically acclaimed book were ones that I had already made. I've made a lot more points besides. I haven't missed much at all, haven't taken a wrong turn, and am developing a key theme in Dante studies. Given that I started my Dante book merely to entertain and amuse myself, to lift my spirits whilst going through the uncertainties of cardiac rehabilitation, I think I am entitled to be a little pleased with my efforts. Dante, of course, is both an awkward read and an unfailing guide. I will examine whether it is testimony to the truth of Dante's faith or to his genius as a poet that he has us believing his impossibilities by the end. In the very least, there is such a thing as poetic invention and redemption. I need to piece the Dante sections and chapters together, edit, and integrate key notes from the very fine Ciabattoni book.
Dante is an incredibly powerful and wide ranging thinker as well as a peerless poet. People can't cope with his deep questioning and where it leads. Brave soldiers of the age of Positivism, their own prejudices concerning non-sense betray them.
Dante believed in a code of ethics as something much more substantial than subjective choice and irreducible preference and opinion. I'll stand by that view. It's accepted with respect to science, and people insist that nature is what it is, regardless of human projections and pretensions. They struggle with that same notion with respect to ethics. I have no trouble in moving from Nature to God here, for the reasons I give in this book. But the idea of Dante as a reactionary fundamentalist is mistaken, and profoundly so. Dante is actually very subversive, radical, and very far from being an elitist. Petrarch is a true elitist, dismissing Dante for soliciting “the windy applause of the masses.” I have an extensive chapter which emphasises the extent to which Dante wrote with conscious political and ethical intent, to move people, all people. I also qualify sharply the notion that Dante is part of a 'Western' canon. I write of the uncanonical Dante who weaves themes drawn from Averroes in his texts. I bring out these points and more in my book.
I like Dante because he is so damned tough and challenging. He's not for the timorous. He gets to the messy heart of the human world, and maybe gets too absorbed himself in politics and in settling scores. He harbored grudges and went mad in Hell. I argue that the Inferno shows the reality of an all-too-human politics and justice, a justice far removed from divine justice. That's the world of a human morality bereft of God's infinite and redeeming mercy and forgiveness. Dante takes us out of a self-made Hell and takes us to true realities. I offer neither proof nor evidence here. There are none. I offer Dante's 'impossibilities.' I show that Dante believes his impossibilities. I show that they make the most sense of the richness of human life as a quest for belonging, meaning, and love. And I show them not to be impossibilities at all, but a faith that is lived in relation to others in cities and communities. Dante lights the way. He is always searching, always challenging, offers no easy options. Dante takes on the toughest moral issues and brings them to a head. He's not for the oafish who stick to the obvious - the people enchained to the empirical necessity of existing institutions and practices and to immediate inclinations of the sense. His vision extends beyond this, buttressed always by a moral praxis that is socially embedded.
This article has an important part of the truth:
The author is a psychologist and clearly appreciates the moral psychology at the heart of The Comedy. Dante's insight into human motivations is genius. I also refer to Dante's mystical psychology. Dante is a rationalist in the Aristotelian mode, his love follows the intellect. But I have no doubt that Dante is a mystic, his reunion with God transcending limited forms of expression is mystical. But Dante is down-to-earth and embedded in politcs and social life for all that.
For all of the mystical aspects of The Comedy with respect to the return to and reunion with God, Dante himself expresses this vision not as a flight from the world, but as inspiring hope and effort within the world. Dante is at pains to stress the direct bearing of his ‘sacred poem’ upon everyday human life, action, and conduct:
non ad speculandum, sed ad opus incoeptum est totum
"not for speculation, but for practical effect was the whole work undertaken"
Dante openly states his practical intention as being that of leading human beings from their present state of misery in a divided society to a state of happiness:
"the end of the whole and of the part is to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and to lead them to the state of felicity."
The aim of Dante's mystical psychology is to facilitate a spiritual experience that is capable of being a force for the reformation of humankind. Dante’s Comedy is the supreme attempt to express the eternal through a necessarily limited symbolism and imagery, portraying the union of the soul with the suprasensible. The mysticism of the ‘sacred poem’ is inherently practical and consciously altruistic. Basing himself on Aristotle’s view of human beings as social beings, Dante is in complete agreement with St. Catherine of Siena’s view that in boosting spiritual virility, the mystical life has a powerful impact on social life: “there can be no perfect virtue, none that bears fruit, unless it be exercised by means of our neighbour." Dante has a direct political intent in not only bringing eternal truths with regard to humanity and nature to the people, but communicating them in the language of the people, translating those truths into practical concerns, making them not only comprehensible, but pertinent. He brings these truths to human beings subjected to the things of time on "the threshing-floor that maketh us so fierce," raising their sights to a vision of Eternity, which Boethius presented as "the complete and perfect simultaneous possession of unlimited life."
In the article above, Black writes that 'The Comedy can be viewed as a sort of gigantic encyclopedia of human motives, classified according to understandable ethical criteria.' That is not merely immensely important, it is crucial to inspiring, motivating, and obligating human beings. Lose that aspect of human existence, and you are lost, at the mercy of external forces and events.
The moral psychology as well as the civic and sociological aspect of Dante is hugely important. I’m interested in the way that Dante gets into appetites and desires, into the motivational economy of human beings, the longings that lead or mislead, depending on the knowledge, acquisition, and exercise of the virtues and modes of conduct. Dante’s world is an inherently ethical world, very different to a world in which fact and value have been separated, the former raised over the latter, the latter reduced to mere value judgement. This world is not one of objects to be studied dispassionately, with knowledge yielded by way of fact and logic and nothing more, but a world of subjects with free-will, which they may use wisely, or not; each has a distinctive point of view, each seeks the satisfaction of desires, seeks happiness, and join with others in society in furtherance of particular ends. Society succeeds or fails according to whether love, the greatest motivational force of all, is properly ordered or is disordered, whether human beings are properly connected or disconnected. The challenge is to form a union of wills in conformity with a greater will, with ultimate reality outside of subjective choice. Dante presents us with a "free necessity," or a "necessary freedom," something which educates free-will to choose the right thing.
Dante describes a world of subjects, a world of wills, which find peace in harmony with a greater will. (‘In bona voluntate, pax nobis est’ (St Augustine)/ ‘In His will is our peace’ (Dante). I could even relate the notion to Rousseau’s ‘general will,’ in that any objective truth cannot just be given it has to be actively willed, internalized, lived – knowledge is not just cognitive, it is affective, in the sense of the ‘moving’ and ‘turning’ Dante writes of). Dante is not just presenting the objective truth of some hypothesis; he is discovering, with sympathy, distress, joy, or outrage, how life works out for actual, various individuals. Change is a self-change, education is a self-education, knowledge is experiential and experimental. As Dante learns, he changes. ‘This is another difference from science as we usually think of it, where the scientist remains detached and above the battle. Dante is absolutely not above the battle.’ Dante, like the rest of us, is in the thick of social and political life; he is, as we are, interested beings. We have stakes in societies, actions, and outcomes. ‘He learns about the appetites and longings that mislead the human heart, often catastrophically, and have misled his own.’ ‘So this is no cool, objective appraisal of human motives; it is a passionately concerned recognition of the terrible or wonderful consequences that flow from our emotional choices, and from our ability or our failure to retain or recover our integrity.’ Lose that, and your demands for action are dead, your knowledge is severed from the springs of action.
I’m interested in the clash of politics, the bridge between theoretical and practical reason, and the discovering/unfolding of truth through dialectic. Politics can cloud truth, it can also through argument and discursive interaction and communication shed light on it. It all depends on how we conceive ‘the political,’ it all depends on how we establish the conditions of the political. Dante argues for good politics, a politics of friendship and love. He also saw the politics of faction and division. ‘Dante for a while was a major figure in the political life of Florence, at a time of civil war and vicious partisan infighting: he had seen firsthand how the consequences of individual psychology include such huge matters as war and peace, social chaos or social harmony, as well as personal grief or happiness. The psychological, the personal, the political, and the religious were not, for him, separate categories: they were closely interrelated, and “sin” was the corrupting element in all of them.’
If you want to change the world, you can’t legislate or dictate truth from the outside like the fabled lawgiver, but have to engage people on the inside and cultivate the inner motives. Dante is engaged and involved, he works on and with character – he doesn’t simply ‘inform’ heads, he seeks to ‘form’ characters. The truth cannot just be passively given, it has to be actively willed. Dante is all about cultivating the right will through the setting of love in order. Virtue is the proper ordering of love to its true ends, as against a disordering which attaches human beings to goods which separate them from each other, from the ultimate good, and from their own selves (or, in a theological idiom, their own souls).
Even if you struggle with numbers, you will understand the internal music. It's innate and universal, a common language we share, making the world as one.
Only connect.
In this book I develop Dante's Comedy as an eco-poetics that is moved by the Greatest Love of all. I've been on the receiving end of complaints that such interests are 'idle' at a time when the planet is unravelling. I used to suffer such complaints as well-meaning, coming from activists seeking to address real problems besetting the world. I don't tolerate it now. I consider such criticism to be blinkered, for reasons E.F. Schumacher gave with respect to the necessity of metaphysical reconstruction to effective action decades ago. Our technics will fail for want of clarity on ends.
I'm interested in a literary ecology modelled on the likes of Dante. I would recommend Joseph Meeker's book The Comedy of Survival here. I took the same approach to the Tolkien piece I wrote a couple of years ago: Tolkien and the Fellowship of all Living Things: The Politics of Proximity, Person and Place. Dante, with his integral approach bounded by the Love that moves all, concerns us and moves us to touch again the wholeness and wholesomeness of the world, seeking to restore that integral ethic within us.
I shall make a general comment here on music/art/aesthetics – let's say Beauty as one of the three transcendentals.
I proceed from the wisdom of Plato in affirming Beauty to be the supreme political category for the way that it lights the path to Truth and Goodness and invites the heart to follow. Since all have a heart, then all can and will respond to Beauty's call to bid an end to our sad divisions. I repeat this view often, because it is my core belief, and I cleave to it. And I shall put a word in for music here, too. Keep your ears open and be ready to hear, and listen to, the inner music of the universe, and how all living creatures express this music in their diverse and particular forms, and you will keep your hearts open.
In The Symposium, Plato wrote of the Divine Beauty which is beheld by the eye. That is a very different notion from the subjectivist assertion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Plato's beauty is something that inheres within a thing, and within the universe, as an objective quality; it has nothing to do with the projection of meaning and value on a meaningless and valueless universe, nothing to do with perceptions, and nothing to do with a Nietzschean perspectivism within power relations. The very opposite, in fact. The one obligates us to conform our subjective choices to a more than subjective truth, the other asserts wilful self-projection as the arbiter of truth. Music links the inner and the outer words in order to avoid having to make such a choice between disclosure and imposure.
Beauty is the last bastion of evangelisation in the subjectivist culture of today, a culture in which solipsism seems to hold all the trump cards (but doesn't). Beauty is possibly the only thing left that motivates all people from deep within the core of their being. Kant wrote of a "common moral reason." We can refer to an innate moral grammar as something we share in common. We have to activate that grammar and learn to sing in tune, in harmony, in unison. Ethically, this is proving elusive. But beauty, aesthetics and music does offer a way of cutting through to commonality when words either fail or divide.
A point I am concerned to make on Dante is that for all of his emphasis on the Greatest Love that moves all things, his last word actually emphasises plurality - “stars.” This is a key point to establish. For all of the chaos and apparent diversity of the Inferno, Hell is a condition of sameness and mechanical repetition. The devil does not have all the best tunes at all. There is no music in Hell: it is a place of immobility and “mechanized petrification” (to borrow a phrase that Max Weber used to describe modern bureaucratic industrial society). Hell is a place of aggressive selfishness expressed in different ways that serve to snare one and all in a dehumanizing sameness. In complete contrast, Paradise is a place of sweet harmony expressing the greatest variety of life. And it is the “diverse voices” in Paradiso that create harmony at its sweetest. There is an inner music, in the universe and in Dante's 'sacred poem.' It is significant that Dante uses a musical image to convey the way that Paradise requires souls of every kind and level. The line he writes is itself the sweetest of music: "Diverse voci fanno dolci note" (Paradiso 6: 124). The literal translation is "Diverse voices make sweet notes.” Or, poetrically rendered: “Diverse voices make sweet music.”
“As diverse voices make sweet music and blend,
so diverse stations of our life amid
these spheres make sweet accord without an end.”
So I shall be writing of the internal music in Dante's Comedy.
Beauty is something to cleave to beyond the clashes of self- and sectional interest and assertion (think of Arnold's Dover Beach here, where the "sea of faith" has withdrawn and "ignorant armies clash by night"), and it still occupies a central place in people’s lives. So long as people continue to strive for beauty, then it is possible for them to be “turned,” (in the sense of Dante's turning in the final lines in The Comedy), and to “turn” people on to the truth and goodness that inheres in and moves all things. These are the three great transcendentals and, whatever Nietzsche says with respect to their fragmentation, they are all connected – they are all qualities of the divine. Nietzsche's critical comments apply to the modern world, not the world as such.
Such will be part of my argument in Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise.
There's much more to the argument.
A character in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot made this bold statement: “Beauty will save the world.” If that is true, then the obvious question is: "what is Beauty?" Dostoyevsky put those words in the mouth of Prince Myshkin, who is a simpleton. Terentiev asks Myshkin if he said it, he is asking him to explain the self-explanatory.
'The context is enlarged by the fact of Myshkin’s love for the abused and then abusing Nastasya Filippovna, whose physical beauty no man could doubt, though whose intelligence he might fear. A portrait of her had conveyed to Myshkin the suffering that underlay a beautiful face. Men love her possessively, even murderously. Myshkin’s own interest is taken for infatuation. He has grasped the suffering and responds to it with a love that is incomprehensible to the shallow – for it is innocent and selfless.'
It is the humble power of Myshkin's selfless, naïve, and “idiot” beauty that will save the world. 'This is a beauty that is not isolated, constrained. This Beauty is finally indistinguishable from the True and the Good. It is embodied in art of the highest order, and it is reflective of that mysterious light of faith – that “saving grace” with which Christ enlightens the world.' This is the truth of Christ’s love for us, a truth that transcends death.
Can Beauty Save the World? by David Warren
Yes.
So let me return to Dante on one of the central teachings of The Comedy concerning love, intellect, vision and truth. The lesson is taught by Beatrice:
"And thou must know that all have delight in the measure of the depth to which their sight penetrates the truth in which every intellect finds rest; from which it may be seen that the state of blessedness rests on the act of vision, not on that of love, which follows after, and the measure of their vision is merit, which grace begets and right will." (109-113)
It is important to note here that love does not lead, it follows. The teaching is delivered with respect to the angels, noted for their keenness of intellectual vision, but it applies to all the blessed. The “truth in which every intellect finds rest” is God as the First Truth, and it is the highest end of human beings to know this Truth. Love follows rather than leads since it is both incited and directed by the thing that is seen, the Beloved. Were love primary, it would be cut off from the truth; rather than being educative it would degenerate into mere feeling. Dante's love is therefore based on the primacy of intellect. In the New Life he calls Beatrice was “the Lady of my mind.”
In this book, I write on reason and Dante as an Aristotelian affirming the desire to know.
I had better end here. I have a massive workload on, and really should stop idling away with commentaries on current progress (which become 'lack of' progress in consequence.
More commentary on Dante by me here:
This is not so unusual a combination as it may seem. Marx didn’t share Dante’s moral and metaphysical commitments, but was an ardent admirer of the man he called “the great Florentine.” In the book Marx’s Inferno, William Clare Roberts explains Marx’s Capital as exhibiting a structure drawn from Dante. Here, I argue that we should set Dante’s undoubted insights into Hell as a self-made Inferno within the moral and metaphysical architectonic of The Divine Comedy as a whole.
I'll just add a final reference to Dante concerning the power of Love, respect for boundaries, and the peace of the blessed life "through which our wills become a single will."
"but you’ll see no such discord in these spheres;
to live in love is—here—necessity,
if you think on love’s nature carefully."
[Paradiso Canto 3: 76-90]
Christian Socialist R. H. Tawney comments here:
"The famous lines in which Piccarda explains to Dante the order of Paradise are a description of a complex and multiform society which is united by overmastering devotion to a common end. By that end all stations are assigned and all activities are valued. The parts derive their quality from their place in the system, and are so permeated by the unity which they express that they themselves are glad to be forgotten, as the ribs of an arch carry the eye from the floor from which they spring to the vault in which they meet and interlace." (Tawney 1982 ch 11).
We will only have agreement on means if we are clear about the ends which we serve.
"Such a combination of unity and diversity is possible only to a society which subordinates its activities to the principle of purpose. For what that principle offers is not merely a standard for determining the relations of different classes and groups of producers, but a scale of moral values. Above all, it assigns to economic activity itself its proper place as the servant, not the master, of society. The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical, or its operation interrupted by embittered disagreements. It is that industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own digestion that he goes to his grave before he has begun to live, industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with the means by which riches can be acquired." (Tawney The Acquisitive Society 1982 ch 11).
There are times when I think I'm on my own taking the approach I do. I could make things much easier for myself. I could be much more popular that way. But I can do no other. I sometimes think I am merely talking to myself. I'm engaged in dialogue with my better half, the half that knows certain things and insists on certain standards. I do my best to maintain them. I cannot serve extraneous ends.
"What does it matter to you what people whisper here?' Virgil asks Dante in Canto 5 of the Purgatorio. "Follow me and let the people talk." I've always been intrigued by the fact that Karl Marx quotes Dante here in the Preface to the first volume of Das Kapital:
"Now, as ever, my maxim is that of the great Florentine: Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.
[Go your own way, and let the people talk]."
Marx alters the line to suit his own purpose: he will make no concessions to make his arguments palatable to the prejudices of others.