Hell is So Boring!
"'Heaven is so boring.' That’s the complaint of a modern-day version of Dante Alighieri in Inferno the Musical, a look at the vagaries of life and love and the inevitability of fate."
I quote. Disapprovingly!
This bittersweet love story, complete with 16 songs, has some of the most talented performers in this year’s Fringe.
"Inferno the Musical" !!! The inanity of people! I've just spent the best part of a year writing up on the Inferno as the realm of anti-music, delineating the carefully crafted musical structure of "The Divine Comedy," giving detailed textual references to the diabolic inversion at work in the Inferno, the way sacred references like the Trinity are reversed in the Inferno, and this crowd of moral oafs and intellectual cretins come along and disturb my peace.
I'm beginning to think that modern "culture" is populated by morons, by hedonistic, infantile, shallow cretins. Talk about missing the point, by a very wide mark. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence who can read will see that it is Hell that is "so boring" and that, far from having all the best tunes, the devil is dull, mechanical, repetitive, tuneless. But this crowd are clueless, utterly soulless. "Inferno the musical." Really. How utterly predictable, boring, how utterly infernal, in fact. We'll just stay in Hell and put it to music, we'll not bother with Purgatory and the restoration of the soul, and there's no point going to Paradise because we know it doesn't exist. If any angels were around to witness this drivel they would surely be weeping. I can write better in my sleep.
The "inevitability of fate." What on Earth has this got to do with Dante?! This is precisely what he argued against with the argument for the proper ordering of human goods, cultivation of the virtues, and the use of free will. He opposed the comedic to the tragic view of life. People get paid to put this drivel on?! People actually pay to watch this drivel?! Why don't they just save their money and carry on acting it out? The whole point of Dante's Divine Comedy was that there is a "happy ending" awaiting those who find their way back to God. This blatant distortion of a literary masterpiece says everything about a civilisation that has lost its moral bearings. There's nothing to sing about in the Inferno, it is a realm of the damned, an infernal soundscape of the hopeless, tuneless wailing of those who are separated from God, from the good, from others, from their best qualities, from their souls. The Inferno is a place of disconnection. It is the realm of the anti-music.
This kind of thing makes me angry in the first instance, but just sorrowful in the end. "The Divine Comedy" ends with a paean to "The Love that moves the sun and the other stars." And there are people, still, who, cut off from that Love, prefer to stay in Hell and celebrate its horrors as joys. Because that is all they know and, worse, all they want to know. I find it decadent and dispiriting, an expression of the death-dealing neurosis that stalks an age totally adrift and cut off from the presence of eternal life in the here and now.
There is a trend for the decadents, hedonists, and sophists of this age to separate the Inferno from The Comedy as a whole, inverting its entire purpose as the restoration of the soul and the reunion with God. As I write in my Dante book, the Inferno is characterised by diabolic inversion and perversion, the reversal of sacred song. And here is the age doing precisely that. It is certainly idiotic culturally. If we take it as part of an anti-Christian sentiment, then it is perverse and diabolic too. I see a lot of this in the contemporary consumption of Dante. It is an age of inversion. Disconnected and disordered. And these cretins consider themselves to be free. I always hesitate to refer to an 'anti-Christian sentiment' in the world. There is certainly a drift away from an authoritative moral framework based on God, and plenty see this as a liberation, seeing that framework as repressive of 'otherness' and 'difference.' It's a complicated issue that needs sensitive treatment. I believe that we need that overarching framework embracing each and all, and enhancing rich human qualities in union and participation with God. I know that whenever I have introduced a religious ethic into my views, to argue for a morality that is more than subjective choice and preference, I have been met with a combination of contemptuous indifference, dismissal and downright hostility. Solipsism seems to hold all the trump cards on this terrain. I think I am entitled to challenge those who seek to invert a religious ethic, draw it into the infernal swamp it is designed to challenge. That's all I am doing here. Stronger claims need to be buttressed by solid argumentation.
It is indeed true that the tendency to see Dante as the poet of Hell is not a new phenomenon at all. That obsession with Hell has always been there - it is the most understandably human of the three books of The Comedy. We watch soap operas now, 'misanthropes half hour' as I call each and every one of them. So it is misguided to denounce the current age too much here (although setting the Inferno to music is precisely the kind of diabolic inversion and perversion that Dante explicitly denounces in the first cantica). The Inferno is the best known of all the three cantica, and various Dantista over the years have been known to complain of the fact. A little reflection makes the focus on the Inferno easy to understand. The qualities of intellect, heart, and soul required for the understanding of the Inferno are by a considerable number of degrees more common than those required for an appreciation of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. The Inferno is comprehensible in terms well within the reach of ‘ordinary’ men and women, sinners one and all. The inhumanism of the Inferno exhibits the consequences of sin, the weakness of the flesh. Understanding this, it is no surprise that human beings easily recognize themselves in the characters and events of the Inferno, coming to experience the sheer colossal force of sin in the Inferno, that weird compulsion that the worst of human nature holds, the way that fascination and horror tighten their grasp on us as we descend from circle to circle in that starless realm where the sun is silent. I can understand the immediate interest. The inveterate tendency to regard Dante as pre-eminently the poet of Hell is easily explained. And that tendency is not remotely a new phenomenon. I just think the fact that people could put it the Inferno to music is a new twist, and a perversion that totally misses the entire point. That seems a novel twist to me, something which does distinguish the age.
The idea that Hell is exciting and Heaven boring is a culturally disastrous commonplace that goes a long way to explaining why men and women are so dis-at-ease in the modern world. An understanding of Dante’s Comedy serves to readjust certain misapprehensions with respect to being and having. Evil, we are told with a repetition that has become predictable and tedious, is more exciting than goodness. Hence the tendency to read the Inferno but no further. These people see it as fun; I see only despair, and a profound failure of the moral imagination. The whole point that Dante makes in the Inferno is that, ultimately, evil is reductive, repetitive, destructive, inhuman, mechanical, boring, and banal. Read further, see the unity in diversity, see how diverse elements flourish in concord and harmony with the oneness of God, and it becomes obvious that goodness is the true source of diversity and spontaneity. Variety is the spice of life. The Inferno is a tuneless soundscape, a flatland, a one-dimensional inhumanism. Beyond, there is variety, dialogic, music, and newness – these are the key characteristics of Dante’s theology. People who read Dante and don’t get that don’t actually read Dante at all – they just bring their own tedious banalities to proceedings and find them confirmed in visions of Hell when Dante seeks to challenge them with a true, rich, and varied humanism.
This next article is better, but still hooks attention by the bait of Hell (and shows precious little understanding of the ethical and spiritual themes - but yes Dante was an innovator and was subversive)
How on Earth are we to explain the inability of contemporaries to raise their sights above "Hell"? Actually, very easily. Hell is self-made and is therefore comprehensible in the most immediate of human terms. I've seen it myself. People trapped in sensualism will "get it." So it will draw a crowd. Self-made man and his undoing. Civilisation will fall from within on this, mark my words.
Inferno is only the first part of the book - the horror to escape. Yes, "The Comedy" is escapism: escapism in the true sense of human beings escaping prison to embrace freedom and enjoy happiness. "The Divine Comedy" is a story of the ascent to Heaven! There are three parts, The Inferno (Hell), Purgatory (in which there are glimpses of heaven, as souls become lighter in being purged of sin) and the Paradiso (Heaven) which is the apex of the whole masterwork, where souls are transformed through - and share in - the love of God. But we don't believe in that kind of thing anymore, do we?
So it seems folk are happy to stay and wallow in the Hell of their own making, and find "fun" in indulging their depravities. Hollow people leading empty lives. This short-changes Dante. In my book I demonstrate the detailed musical structure of The Comedy at length, showing how Hell inverts true music and its meaning. Most of all it short-changes human beings, narrows their visions to well below their capabilities. Read the Inferno and see how, at the pit, is Lucifer, once the most beautiful and most capable of all the angels, now frozen and immobilized, repeating the same actions for all eternity. (I have a good chapter comparing this description with Max Weber's characterization of the modern industrialized world as a "mechanized petrification," the "iron cage" that confines each and all. "The devil has all the best tunes"!? Heaven is boring? I don't think so. Clueless, soulless people. Lost travellers who have stopped travelling. They say "fun" but I hear only despair. Dante lights the way.
I'm seeing people taking an interest in Dante, except it always seems to be the Inferno, the most in/human of the three books. I think they read it because it is the most familiar in a society that has not only lost its way, but thinks they are living in heaven having lost it. I find it telling that we have a "culture" that bars talk of Heaven whilst wallowing around in Hell. If you want redemption, you're going to have to have contrition, and identify sin and name it as such. To read Dante without that ethic and vision is to be morally blind. "The Love that moves the sun and the other stars..." isn't just a poetic fancy, put in for aesthetic appeal - it actually means something, it refers to something, it actually "turns" human beings around, expands being outwards to God and to others through the inner motives.
Dante made his intentions with respect to his ‘sacred poem’ plain:
'The subject of the whole work, literally accepted is the state of souls after death.... But if the work is taken allegorically the subject is MAN, as rendering himself liable, by good or ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to rewarding or punishing justice.'
Dante, Epistola (Letter to Can Grande) xi. § 8
For Dante, then, the real subject of the Inferno is 'Man, as rendered liable, by ill desert in the exercise of his free will, to punishing justice.' That is assuredly a subject designed to attract and repel in equal measure, something that in lesser hands could breed a condition of incorrigible sadness and hopelessness. This is the worst that humans do, and both the familiarity and frequency of the actions could suggest that inhumanism is the normal human state. In Dante’s hands, as prophet as much as philosopher and poet, the probing of the subject matter by way of the moral imagination eventually releases the life confined within the iron casing. Since this is the true purpose of The Comedy, it follows that all the physical horrors which draw and even hold the attention are actually subordinate to a greater force; they are merely a means by which the poet seeks to guide us to the true end, and by no means the end itself. The problem is not that people are drawn to the Inferno, but that they never get out of it. Since the subject of the poem is a moral one, then the descriptions of physical torment and horror in the Inferno are there to elaborate the true 'motive' of the work. To turn the means into the end is to overbalance the work’s delicate symmetry; to remain in the Inferno is a negation of the true purpose of the work. Instead of reawakening and guiding the feelings by way of moral impressions, the preoccupation with the events of Hell deaden and destroy them and render them incapable of the very moral insurgency that Dante sought to incite. In leaving an overwhelming physical impression upon the mind, the absorption in the Inferno cuts us off from the transcendent power with which Dante sought to enthral, enthuse, inspire, and uplift.
That transcendent power is missed by those who think Hell exciting and entertaining. Dante describes the horrors of human life with an escalating intensity until they climax in scenes of grotesque wretchedness and depravity. But Dante is out to elevate, not titillate, and he has these scenes under complete moral control. The actions he describes serve to intensify moral conceptions, induce human beings to use the gift of free-will wisely to realize a true and rich humanism. Dante educates the eye. To the uneducated eye, these scenes are numbing and deadening. So the numb and the dead put them to music.
I shall keep plugging away on this one. Osip Mandelstam in his commentary on Dante asks how much shoe leather Dante wore out in his journey to put a broken world of broken people back together. Dante the traveller in exile, without a home but not lost, is a sympathetic figure.
I love Victor Hugo, but he's wrong on this, and I challenge this view that "Heaven is boring" with some force and vigour in my Dante book. This article is closer. I’ll add that Geoffrey Chaucer was profoundly influenced by Dante in writing “The Canterbury Tales,” one of the greatest of all books in English literature. I have a good book showing how closely Chaucer mimicked Dante at key points.
It will be 700 years since the death of Dante in 2021, and I hope to do the man that Marx called "the great Florentine" justice. (Always been intrigued by Marx's interest here, he just read Dante as great literature and no more. I think there is much more).
I don't mind wandering around in Hell, and like Quasimodo I don't mind the monsters at all, not least because they do much less harm than some folk. So long as people understand what it's all about and are prepared to engage in a little soulcare, restoration, and reconnection. It's a painful process, contrition. Easier to stay in a state of bifurcation, but not satisfying ultimately. This lot seem to be making a virtue of disconnection. I'm losing patience with people consuming fun and entertainment on a hedonistic treadmill - separated from both body and soul, commodified and petrified. If you think I'm complaining above, you should hear me commenting on the "music" served on an infernal loop on the radio daily. On reflection, I don't think I was too lost for words after all. This should be good indeed. I always like a little bit of Purgatory, souls on the move, restoration. "Inferno the musical," I ask you. I have almost calmed down. Now, let me see, a little more Dante should do it.
This is more like it.
The ninth monologue of Samuel Beckett’s 1954 “Texts for Nothing” offers a literal translation of the four concluding words of the ‘Inferno’: ‘and see the stars again’ (a riveder le stelle). They are spoken by a tramp-like waif as he contemplates death:
“There’s a way out there, there’s a way out somewhere, the rest
would come, the other words, sooner or later, and the power to
get there, and the way to get there, and pass out, and see the
beauties of the skies, and see the stars again.”
On his resurgence from the death-like impasse of Hell, Dante Alighieri too will “see the stars again”. That's precisely the message for all of us, to seek the Love that enfolds, nourishes, moves, and carries all, the Love that enthuses and infuses, orients the whole, and directs all things to rest in their true place.