Ecopoetics, disclosing the Hidden God in Nature
“Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. Good took seeds from other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.”
–Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
I shall return to Dostoevsky later. This is a post for all of those interested in ecopoetics and literary ecology. To begin, here is a wonderful article by Susan S. Morrison: “Slow Pilgrimage Ecopoetics,” for all those who may be interested in a slow eco-critical approach to Dante, Chaucer, or Langland. Special issue on Randomness and Design. Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 10.1 (2019): 40-59.
I'm very much one of those who is most interested indeed. I've been pondering Dante’s ‘sweet symphony’ of Paradise as an eco-poetics moved by the Greatest Love for the past couple of years. I do hope to have this finished well before the 700th anniversary of “the great Florentine’s” death in 2012. Life has this knack of always interfering with my best laid and very extensive plans. I'm nearly back on track and am encouraged now to finish it. In fact, I have over 500,000 words of text completed on this. I need to edit this down into readable form. I am also wondering whether to add a chapter on the ‘music of the spheres.’ I think Dante stands in line of descent from Pythagorean-Platonic notions of order and harmony, but if you examine The Comedy it is most clearly the angels and the blessed whose singing you can hear, not the physical bodies of the spheres themselves. That’s work to come.
I've had the odd complaint that such things are idle at a time when the planet is unravelling. That view is blinkered, for reasons E.F. Schumacher gave with respect to the necessity of metaphysical reconstruction to effective action decades ago (The Economics of Purpose). 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. (Reference here, Tolkien and the Ethics of Enchantment). Dante, with an integral approach that is bound by the Love that moves all, concerns us to the depths of our being and thereby inspires us to touch again the wholeness and wholesomeness of the world, restoring that integral ethic within us.
If I may, I shall give my forthcoming Dante yet another plug.
I shall also take the opportunity to make a general comment on music/art/aesthetics – let's say Beauty as one of the three transcendentals.
I repeat this view often, for the very reason it is my core belief, and I cleave to it. Here I praise the wisdom of Plato in identifying beauty as 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 if given appropriate encouragement, bidding an end to our sad divisions. I shall also put a good word in for music, too. Keep your ears open and listen to the inner music of the universe, and how all living creatures add their voices to the choir, and you will keep your hearts open.
In The Symposium Plato wrote of the Beauty which is beheld by the eye. That’s a very different notion from the subjectivist assertion that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” It's nothing to do with the projection of meaning and value on a meaningless and valueless universe, nothing to do with perceptions, 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 to avoid having to make such a choice between disclosure and imposure.
Beauty is the last bastion of evangelisation in the subjectivist culture which prevails 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" possessed by all. We can refer here 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.
A point that 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 emphasises plurality - “stars.” It's 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. Difference in Hell is a matter of separation, isolation, and disconnection. Dante’s Paradise is a multiplicity within the oneness of God, a harmonic and symbolic unity that brings together different elements/meanings/worlds to overcome their separation (the true meaning of the diabolical). Dante gives us a living symbolism or iconography of life. I am very much interested in notions of the disclosure of the Hidden God through the two natures (universal essences) as one differentiated in unity without confusion and separation.
The devil does not have all the best tunes. 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 snare one and all in 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.”
“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.”
In my forthcoming book I write at length on the internal music in Dante's Comedy.
Beauty is something to cleave to beyond the clashes of self- and sectional interest and assertion (I am thinking of Arnold's Dover Beech here). Beauty 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 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 (his comment applies to the modern world, not the world as such), they are all connected – they are all qualities of the divine.
Such will be part of my argument in Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise. There's much more to it, though, including extensive arguments on environmental accord, peace on Earth, reconciliation and justice in politics and society.
I return now to Dostoyevsky. A character in Dostoevsky's The Idiot made this bold statement: “Beauty will save the world.” If that is true, then what is Beauty? Dostoyevsky put those words in the mouth of Prince Myshkin, 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.'
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 that love does not lead, it follows. This teaching is delivered with respect to the angels, noted for their keenness of intellectual vision, but it applies to all of 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, then it would be cut off from the truth and degenerate into mere feeling rather than being educative. Dante's love is therefore based on the primacy of intellect. In the New Life he calls Beatrice was “the Lady of my mind.”
I write on reason and Dante as an Aristotelian who affirmed the desire to know. I write of Dante as a Thomist who insisted that all things, including love, and maybe love especially, need to be ordered to their true end.
And on those intriguing notions I had better end. I have a massive workload (as usual), and need to really start writing my Dante book properly.
Anyhow, that's me. But please do follow up the links and explore the fields of literary ecology and ecopoetics. Culture with its moral and imaginative components in place is key as civilization enters a bottleneck. Culture has saved us before. It can also drive us to self-destruction. It all depends. Human beings are, quite naturally, immersed in culture. We need to be wise and sophisticated in how we use our signs and symbols. I’m interested the “logos of the Logoi” (Logos=purpose, reason, word, story, discourse, harmony, principle, etc.) The word is alive, sensible, and intelligible, there is music and poetry, and Dante takes us into the ecology of the human heart:
oikos–household
oikumene–earth as dwelling
economy–law of the household
ecology–study of the household, logos of the household, story of the household.
I'll just add a final reference to Dante concerning the power of Love, the 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]
Perfect.
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."
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
[excuse the long posts. I have to write what comes in my head before I lose it. I then revisit, rescue, and rewrite it elsewhere. I have to catch it whilst it flows on by]