Fire and Ice
Fire and Ice: where would Dante place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth…?
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
In a "Science and the Arts” presentation from 1960, astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired Frost’s Fire and Ice poem. Shapley had met Frost a year before the poem was published, and Frost had asked him, an astronomer of some repute, how he thought the world would end. Shapley replied that either the sun will explode and the Earth will be incinerated, or, should the Earth escape this fate, it will end up slowly freezing in deep space. So the Earth will end either by fire, consumed by the Sun, or by ice, carrying on as a cold and lifeless rock. Shapley considers the poem to be an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning. He may well be right. But I’d like to present another interpretation, one that goes much deeper than physical causality. In this view, Frost is using the physical threats of fire and ice to comment on the quality of human relationships rather than on the end of the physical world. Frost’s references to desire and hate suggest that some such meaning is intended here.
Frost may be alluding to the Inferno in Dante’s Comedy, where both fire and ice are punishments. Dante also writes of will and desire being “turned by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.” (Commedia, Paradiso XXXIII 142-146). I think this gives us the clue. Fire and ice are opposites in the same way that desire, as lust, born of fire, and hate, born out of ice, denoting a coldness, a lack of feeling or care, are opposites. Desire and hate are not just opposite emotions in this context, they are extremes, extremes of love, of physical and spiritual love, of the love of human beings, of humanity, of the Earth, of life ... Life ceases at either extreme. Both extremes destroy the soul of the individual, of humanity, of the world, and the metaphors of fire and ice fit that end perfectly. The simple beauty of Frost’s poem is revealed when we see the two opposites of fire and ice as forming a unity, the end which comes to the world on the outside when it dies on the inside. And the world dies when its central core of love is denied and is sent to the margins. We live in a relational world. Get those relations wrong, and we are going to Hell.
The latest issue of Science features a short, but forceful editorial by the journal’s editor in chief, the geophysicist Marcia K. McNutt. She calls for humanity to end decades of procrastination and get serious about cutting greenhouse-gas emissions linked to global warming. “The time for debate has ended,” she writes. “Action is urgently needed.”
Well, questioning and criticising will carry on for as long as science (or philosophy or any other human contemplative activity) continues to be worthy of the name. This part of McNutt’s article has been subject to vociferous criticism, the accusation that this is politics and advocacy and assertion rather than real science. Point taken. But we live in a public world, a practical world and a social world. The world is not an external, objective datum fit only for pure passive scientific contemplation. However much science will carry on, the time has come for serious climate action in the field of politics and public policy. What is most interesting about McNutt’s article is the way that she frames the argument for climate action around morality as much as scientific evidence, alluding to Dante’s allegorical journey through Hell to set the tone of her piece:
‘In Dante’s Inferno, he describes the nine circles of Hell, each dedicated to different sorts of sinners, with the outermost being occupied by those who didn’t know any better, and the innermost reserved for the most treacherous offenders. I wonder where in the nine circles Dante would place all of us who are borrowing against this Earth in the name of economic growth, accumulating an environmental debt by burning fossil fuels, the consequences of which will be left for our children and grandchildren to bear?’
I’ll just say here that I dislike the concept of Hell and would prefer to avoid it. The danger with such a notion is that it divides the world between the forces of infallible good and of irredeemable evil, so that your side – friends - can do no wrong and those with opposing views – enemies – can do no right. It’s the end of politics and it diminishes us all. The approach involves a dangerous mindset. The problem with fighting wars against evil is that you turn into the very evil you are fighting. Hell is embroidery, a poetry or a mythology that serves to elaborate certain points about right living and wrong living. It can be useful in showing how bad choices have bad consequences, and how we are always free and responsible in acting the way we do. That is how I read and value Dante. At the same time, it’s a human invention and, like all such inventions, it is one that can rebound on us, giving us the power and justification for human beings to do terrible things to each other. But isn’t that precisely the point about human power, culture, technology, knowledge? So whilst I have a great deal of sympathy with those who would prefer to close Hell down and send the devil packing, I do think this is an evasion of the big issue at stake here – good and bad and the human ability to choose one or the other, and the human responsibility to make that choice. This is precisely the issue raised by industrialisation and the extension of human technological power over the world. But just be aware of the danger that, in fighting the forces of Hell, you may become a devil yourself.
I like Dante's work in general. And I like Dante's Comedy in particular, for this reason, it is a summa, an encyclopaedia that covers all knowledge, all of life and its living, and Dante makes it clear throughout that human beings are free moral agents whose actions have consequences, good and bad, intended and unintended. We are social beings; what we do impacts on others and on the world around us. We are charged with the duty to use our intellect, our rationality to know what is true and right, and to choose and act accordingly. He doesn’t duck the difficult issues of sin and punishment, and it makes me very uncomfortable to read the way characters are placed in Hell. I make it clear that such an approach can easily backfire. But we need to be clear the way that Dante structures this argument, what he is getting at – what it is to be a fulfilled human being, and the ways in which we fall short, and how totally we may fail. I always try to qualify the emphasis on personal responsibility with an emphasis on institutional responsibility, the way that individuals are locked within socially structured patterns and habits of behaviour that can only be turned to good against bad by joining with others in common endeavour. Again, though, Dante writes beautifully on the city and on politics as public spheres in which active, informed citizens may come together and determine together affairs of common concern.
Catherine Keen, Dante and the City
Joan M.Ferrante, The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy
We were promised industrial ‘progress’ as Heaven on Earth. Instead, we have brought about a crisis in the climate system threatening the basis of civilised life and threatening to make the world a Hell. The poets had seen this from the start.
Passing the Carron Iron Works in 1787, the poet Robert Burns scratched these lines on a window-pane:
“We cam na here to view your warks,
In hopes to be mair wise,
But only, lest we gang to Hell,
It may be nae surprise.”
Warning of a 6C global warming, scientist Stephen Emmott warns that the world will become "a complete hellhole" riven by conflict, famine, flood and drought. There is little hope for the future here. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here”, reads the inscription to the entrance of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.
I’ll balance this gloomy view up with Chris Goodall’s critique of Emmott’s 10 Billion book as ‘unscientific and misanthropic’.
This Hell on Earth is a self-made Hell.
‘Life is frightened out of its highly enlightened wits by the return of ancient nightmares: the tales of the sorcerer's apprentice, of dwarfs with magic powers. The promise of Heaven for the poor in spirit is understood to mean that, on earth at least, they should be educated into clever people able to manipulate and let loose the technical installations of Hell. And in art, there are sounds most skilfully organized, furies expressed in the most virtuoso fashion, and proud of signifying nothing. Whole systems of aesthetics are evolved to justify this state of affairs. A world emptied of meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content. And, indeed, the attempt to distil poetry from the things or ideas that form our 'real' world would be in vain.’(Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind).
But it's a self-made Hell that can be unmade.
A couple of decades ago, the zoologist Jonathan Kingdon wrote the book Self-Made Man and His Undoing (1993). He writes: ‘Drawn further and further out of our biological matrix we have become more and more dependent on an all-embracing but loveless technology to see us through. Under this impassive influence we have become orphans of our own technology.’
‘We cannot make a scapegoat of the technological revolution that has pampered us yet passed by the emaciated victims we see on television. It is an extension of what we are. If we are greedy and selfish technology will be a faithful mirror. Left to its own dynamics technological and industrial innovation trashes products, places and people. Technology is at once social shredder, racial churn and political furnace. It is for the children of technology to humanise their parent or, like Saturn, it will consume them. Self-made Man and his society will be undone. If the twenty-first century sets out to build a new sense of family it has powerful tools to help in the task. If it doesn't, its antithesis - increasing conflicts between haves and have-nots - is inevitable.’
‘The study of natural processes, so long confined to the laboratory, has now moved on to the broad stage of international politics and raises issues that must engage us in new struggles.’
‘This cannot be a mere technical fix but will involve a social and spiritual revolution.’ (Kingdon 1993: 316-317).
And that entails right actions for right reasons within right relationships.
In the third ring of the seventh circle of Hell, the worst ring of that circle, are those who have committed the greater crime, that of violence against Nature and hence against God. Dante presents a picture of lost and wondering souls assailed by a perpetual rain of fire in an arid desert wasteland …
Familiar? I’ll quote computational scientist Stephen Emmott again here:
‘recent research shows that we look certain to be heading for a larger rise in global average temperatures than 2C – a far larger rise. It is now very likely that we are looking at a future global average rise of 4C – and we can't rule out a rise of 6C. This will be absolutely catastrophic. It will lead to runaway climate change, capable of tipping the planet into an entirely different state, rapidly. Earth will become a hellhole.’
Dante has some words as to why we have ended up here. Through ‘foul usury’, humankind violates the Creation, our God given dwelling, committing a violence against God by ‘despising Nature and her goodness’ (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, Paradiso, XXII, 151 and Inferno, canto XI, lines 46-48 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). There is nothing in the Bible which entitles human beings to exterminate or destroy or hold in contempt anything on Earth, the stewardship it affirms holds precisely the contrary. We may use the gifts of nature but have no right to ruin or waste them. That is not what ‘dominion’ entails. We have the right to use what we need, but no more than that. The Bible forbids usury and condemns great accumulations of property. As Dante argues, ‘the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere.’ (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XI, lines 109-11.) By taking more than we are entitled to, we are destroying our place within Creation and, as a result, are destroying our own Being.
In ordering the sins against Nature and God, Dante distinguishes between sins of incontinence and sins of malice. Sins of incontinence are lesser sins, passions which got the better of individuals, which they were not able to contain – lust, gluttony, avarice, anger and prodigality. (Hey, we’ve all been there, we are only human after all. But I’ve learned my lesson and will never do it again. Not as often anyway). Sins of malice are the worst of all, since they involve a perversion of human reason or intellect, the deliberate use of intelligence for the wrong ends, for private gain or advantage, at the expense of others, causing injury to others. Many people sin unwittingly, ‘they know not what they do’. But we have a moral duty to know. Worst of all, though, are those who sin wittingly, who put their private gain or advantage before the good of all, to the detriment of all.
There are some pertinent words from Luzzi in light of contemporary environmental problems: “the deeper one goes into Dante’s hell, the smarter the sinners”, Luzzi observes. And “the damned always refuse to accept responsibility for their actions and embrace the greatest gift of all, free will”.
In Laudato Si, Pope Francis writes: “It is remarkable how weak international political responses have been. The failure of global summits on the environment make it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so that their own plans will not be affected” (54).
Dante would pose the question, how many of those acting in a self-interested way to the detriment of the common good, do so knowingly? To be more precise, in the context of this article on climate change, are there self-interested parties who are so committed to prevailing social and economic arrangements that benefit them in the immediate and short-term, whatever the social and ecological cost as a whole, that they actively and knowingly deny either or both the problem of climate change and the proposed solutions to it?
I’d say ‘yes’, such is the political world of competing social interests, groups and classes we live in. And Dante reserves some of the deepest places in Hell for them. The problem, in an age of non-belief, is this, such people may well not get their just deserts in the afterlife, just as the good folk who do the right thing may well not get to Heaven as their reward. Here’s my appeal, if we act as though Hell and Heaven are realities, and take our second chances to choose and act wisely and responsibly in the middle ground, we may well yet succeed in taking our place on earth as our ‘common home’, a Paradiso indeed. That's a deliberately modest claim I make there, minimal assumptions for maximum agreement. We can all do this. If we don’t, if we choose and act badly, if we fail to come together and constitute ourselves as a ‘we’ in politics, generate the form and forms of the common life enabling us to conduct our common affairs in light of the long-term common good, if we continue to let free-riders control our futures, then one day bad actions generating bad consequences will indeed turn the earth into a hellhole. Dante’s imagery might be stark, unpleasant even, but he is encouraging us to think deeply on the key existential questions of who we are, where we are, how we live our lives and how we ought to live our lives, what mental, moral and institutional capacities and tools we need to live well, how we order our relationships between ourselves and with the world, how we arrange our affairs not merely to live but to live well.
In the eighth circle of Hell, we are confronted with the sin of fraud. The fraudulent are thieves who deprive other people of their rightful share of earthly goods. Bear in mind that for Dante fortuna is something we all have to deal with in life, life is how we act in face of fortune, the things that befall us. The fraudulent use their intellect to cheat fortune and are therefore ministers of ill fortune. Further on in the descent into Hell, we meet the counsellors of fraud, the sowers of discord and the falsifiers. Yes, the falsifiers, the people who deny truth and turn it into its opposite for their own gain. Their punishment is to suffer in the valley of the diseased for all the disease they have spread in society. For the secular amongst us, there is no consolation in any of this, for it is the men and women of good will, as well as the more-than-human world, that suffers in the meantime from this dis-ease, punishment through social dislocation and ecological despoliation for the sins of others.
When we enter the lowest depths of Hell, the very bottom circle, we leave behind the fire and enter a barren icy wasteland. Here we enter the circle of the treacherous, where the sinners are immersed in ice. Here we find the traitors, traitors to their kindred and to their country. Here Dante meets Lucifer, in the very centre of the earth, trapped in ice. A parody of the trinity, a parody of true Christian love. Hell is the anti-Paradise.
Patriotism? What does that word denote? To whom or what do we owe loyalty? I can perhaps make Dante’s point here more understandable by reference to an eco-patriotism, an oikophilia, a love of place, a biophilia, a love of life. In a chapter in Here on Earth calling for human beings to embrace biophilia as a condition of their own survival, ecologist Tim Flannery quotes the Bible: ‘A new commandment I give unto you. That ye love one another.’ (John 13). Flannery wants us to love life as a whole as well as each other.
‘I am certain of one thing—if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth.’
Flannery 2010 ch 23
Flannery writes of ‘just letting heavens’ performance run on and on’ (Flannery 2010 ch 5). I don’t much care whether we call this Creation Care with Pope Francis or Earthcare with Carolyn Merchant, it just seems obvious to me that if you believe in a Creator God you are going to respect and look after the Creation, just as it is obvious that if you want to live healthy and flourishing lives, you are going to respect and look after the sources of life, our biological and ecological matrix. As Flannery writes:
‘But those ancient practices just might teach us something more—that people blessed with healthy, diverse ecosystems are likely to endure and prosper. I say this because environments with intact keystone species are more productive, and therefore better habitats for humans.’ (Flannery 2010: ch 8)
Flannery argues that human beings should adopt the concept of biophilia so as to appreciate biodiversity as a condition of flourishing. To destroy those ecosystems, pollute the sources of life, engage in practices that render species extinct, ruin habitats and burn up the earth – that’s what I would call treachery, a treachery against our kin, a treachery that is an affront to our kinship not just with other human beings but with other species. Our common home is built upon the common ground in which we share universal kinships and co-operations. Biologists point to the genetic unity of life. Ethicists point to the moral unity. All organisms are descended from the same life form. We are bonded to the living environment by the genetic unity of all life, kinship and ancient history. Good economics, they say in commodifying and exploiting ‘natural resources’, ‘progress’, ‘jobs, growth and investment’. Treachery, I call it, ‘foul usury’ in Dante’s words, a violation of God and Nature.
Many people associate the term ‘biophilia’ with the biologist E.O. Wilson. I know it from its earlier use in the work of social psychologist/critical theorist Erich Fromm. He writes:
‘I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom.’
Fromm, E. The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1965
That seems right and reasonable. I tend to write of ‘happiness’ as flourishing these days rather than freedom, mind. And virtuous action and a sufficiency of material goods within right relationships.
A parallel can be drawn between the idea of a self-made Hell with Max Weber’s view of capitalist modernity as an ‘iron cage’ that determines the lives of those confined within it with ‘irresistible force’.
'The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.'
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1985: 181
A parallel can also be drawn between Max Weber’s view of the mechanised modern world as an ‘iron cage’ confining its human creators and Dante’s figure of Lucifer frozen and immobilised in Hell.
Oh in etterno faticoso manto! ‘O weary mantle for eternity!’,
‘Oh what a toilsome cloak to wear forever!’ [Inferno XXIII 58-69]
The way that Lucifer, the most beautiful and noble of all the angels, has been reduced to mechanical form indicates the immobilizing of personality which results from sin. Lucifer, as the greatest sinner, is utterly immobilised, doomed to spend eternity petrified in the ice of his own creation. And here he suffers the ultimate pain of isolation. (Ryan 2003). This is petrification as excommunication, severing the connection to others. Dante knew exile from others as a death sentence itself, the destruction of the social nature of a human being.
It is no accident that the bottom of Dante's hell is cold. The core of eternal punishment in the Commedia is not a furnace of fire but a lake of ice where sinners are frozen hard and fast forever. This image still startles new readers of the poem - it is so far from what any of us would call the "traditional" picture of hell. Yet in another way it is deeply traditional, growing out of a complex of inter-related Augustinian language, conceptuality and metaphor that had already shaped the thinking of the West for nearly a thousand years. Within this traditional complex fire is predominantly a heavenly rather than hellish metaphor. For flame by nature rises, heading (as ancient physics would have it) toward its home among the fiery stars of heaven. Charity in Augustine is spiritual fire, an ardent desire raising the soul toward God. The movements of Dante's souls are governed by this metaphor of fiery charity. The lake of solid ice at the bottom of the universe just works out its negative implications: the descent into hell means leaving warmth and light behind. Its positive implications can be seen in the happiness of Piccarda, at peace even in the lowest sphere of heaven because all her desires come to rest in the highest Light of all, like fire finding its natural place in the stars (Par 3:70-87). And the movement depicted by the metaphor can be seen in the wonderful rule of ascent on Mount Purgatory, where the climb gets easier as you go (Purg. 4:88-94)--for the closer you get to heaven the less earthly is your weight and the more like fire, ascending naturally and without effort. Ice and fire, immobility and ascent, weight and rest, make visible the trajectories of love in Dante's world. We need sensible metaphors for this, because love is a movement not in space but in the will, a psychological rather than corporeal dimension which we can experience and understand but cannot literally imagine. For imagination requires sensible images drawn from the world of bodily things, while the soul is a dimension of its own, altogether beyond the grasp of the senses. So Dante, following Augustine, represents the one dimension by the other, using the bodily ascent of fire as a metaphor to represent the love which moves souls toward God. (Cary 2006: 5-36).
Reading Dante’s description of Hell as a lake of ice where sinners are frozen hard and fast for all eternity, I cannot help draw a parallel with sociologist Max Weber’s conception of a rationalised, bureaucratised modernity. Weber shows how the objective discharge of roles and tasks within the modern bureaucratic world proceeds according to calculable rules, ‘without regard for persons’ (Weber 1991:215). In the Inferno, Dante describes the moat of thieves, where members find that not even their bodies are their own, but may be taken from them at any time by a fellow thief, leaving them to steal a body from someone else, and on and on for all eternity. (A selfish world which proceeds without ‘regard for persons’, the phrase by which Weber described the modern world.) Dante describes the exchanges which take place in graphic detail. In one instance, a thief in the body of a reptile bites a thief in a human body on the naval.
Weber conceives modern bureaucratic organisation as a ‘mechanised petrification, embellished with a convulsive self-importance’, with human beings being confined in mind, body and soul within a steel hard cage, a physical and psychic prison that continues until ‘the last ton of fossilized fuel is burnt’. (Weber 1985:181/2). Petrification means the conversion of organic material into a fossilized form. Regulated from cradle to grave in a network of disciplines, we have fossilized ourselves. Our ‘mechanised petrification’ is of our own doing, through our self-importance, our selfishness.
Weber portrays modernity as a form of Hell:
'Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but the proletarian has lost his rights' (Weber 1970: 128).
Weber thus prophesies an icy darkness and hardness for all eternity – it’s Dante’s Hell on Earth, a self-made paradise as an iron cage.
Our external triumph has been bought at the expense of an internal diminution. And that hardening of the psyche, immobilising human sensibilities, is part and parcel of a steel hard machine civilisation whose addiction to fossil fuels is burning up the planet.
For Weber, we have lost the overarching moral framework by which we lived our lives. We were doomed to live in a morally divided world (Lassman and Velody 1989:22). Weber poses the question, 'Which of the warring gods shall we serve?' (Weber 1970:155). Dante Alighieri gives us the answer by asking another question entirely.
Weber writes:
'No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."'
Weber 1985:182
Until the inversion of means and ends is addressed, and life re-enchanted, the accumulation of quantity through the exploitation of the planet will continue to misfire, delivering material riches at the expense of human happiness.
Which begs the question of whether it is possible to explore our ecological self while imprisoned in the steel hard cage of a rationalised modern necropolis powered by ancient wastes which Mother Nature, in her wisdom, has kept buried beneath her skin.
Dante’s Hell and Weber’s modernity as mechanised petrification is the end of the living world through both ice and fire, through the loss of true human relations, the loss of love of life, the loss of warm, affective ties and bonds. For all of the burning of fossil fuels, it’s all ice out there. For Dante, such an end is born of idolatry, the veneration of human power as a false idol which serves to separate human beings from the true reality and from their true nature. Weber would refer to the pathos of means and ends, of means enlarged to displace genuine ends, ends we set ourselves through free will, ends which relate in some way to the meaning inherent in the world in which we live.
Weber’s description of the modern world as a ‘mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance’ is apt. The modern individual is subject to a material determinism without and an egoistic compulsion within, droning his or her life away within a material mechanism that proceeds ‘without regard for persons’, yet nevertheless inflating the importance of the most trivial things in order to make the point that, despite all evidence to the contrary, ‘I’ matter. That assertion on the part of individuals reveals something much more profound than narcissism and egoism – it reveals that the human quest for meaning endures, however impaired and distorted.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber was concerned to challenge the view that history is determined by economic interests. For Weber, the most powerful driver of change in history emerges from the synergy of combined metaphysical motives and material interests. Neither element alone is enough to bring substantial change, what matters is their combined interaction. What Kingdon calls a ‘social and spiritual revolution’ is to be considered part of the metaphysical reconstruction that E.F. Schumacher demanded in his Small is Beautiful. Dante writes of the love that moves the sun and the other stars. Our relations to the planet are shaped by our relations to each other. This is why I would argue that the environmental movement is both material and metaphysical, why, for all of the emphasis on alternate technology, on science, on the crisis in the climate system, protecting the health of ecosystems, preserving biodiversity, environmentalism is part of the human quest for meaning. To be successful in delivering the ecological transformation of human relations and politics, the environmental movement has to transcend single-issue campaigning and adopt an integral approach embracing ecology, economics, metaphysics and morals. Because, at the deepest level, environmentalism is not merely about this or that issue, atmospheric pollution, extinction of species, ocean acidification, desertification etc, but about something much more profound. From this perspective, environmentalism is not merely a protest against the emptying of the world of its natural resources, but against the emptying of the world of its meaning. Environmentalism is about the recovery and affirmation of inherent value, in the sense of worth as deriving from the Old English word 'woerthship', from which we get 'worship.' What values do we worship, which gods do we serve? I am therefore arguing for environmentalism as a movement that integrates material and metaphysical or spiritual motives in the quest for meaning in life. In fine, environmentalists act in defence of the cosmos as a whole, not its scenic parts. Environmentalism therefore re-unites politics and spirituality, refusing to separate out values from the public and material world in the way that has characterised our political and economic life in an age of atomistic, reductionist, scientific materialism. I think we can discern in environmentalism a profound need for a meaning and fulfilment that can only be described as spiritual, a need which transcends the materialist frame of ecology as science.
There are many who think that the environmental crisis is now out of our control. We have sat by and watched and waited, allowing an untrammelled economic system, lacking in thought, foresight and morality, kick the biosphere over the edge of the cliff. We are beyond the point of no return. We are past 400ppm, and at least 4C of temperature increase is baked in. The world will become a hellhole.
Such predictions have a wealth of scientific research and understanding behind them. So who am I to contest the vision of a nightmarish future to come? Maybe the paradox is this, that as a resut of human self-creation being invested in social and economic forms and powers which have proved destructive of planetary ecosystems, we are facing the scope for human agency dwindling away to nought. I still affirm the indeterminacy of the future and the role of human agency and responsibility. Dante is damning of fortune tellers. He thinks they deny us of a future by denying human choice, responsibility and agency. He gives them a fitting punishment, twisting their heads around so that they look backwards, and walk backwards too. The future is more than the present enlarged, so long as we intervene in supposedly 'objective' processes and act to turn trends and tendencies in favourable directions. Each action brings a reaction. Actions have consequences.
Where does responsibility lie? We each have the capacity for choice. Dante looks at the heart of the white rose and says I saw within its depths how it conceives all things in a single volume bound by love, of which the universe is the scattered leaves. This is the answer, from the depths of Hell through the delights of earth to the centre of all knowing and the mind of God - In each place humanity exists. And the underlying force that creates and unites humanity is the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
The real world? Paradiso? The world we we could have had, the world we were gifted. The world that exists beyond time and space, no matter what we do to the earth we have been gifted? Dante remains my inspiration. He writes of the guidance that gives hope and shows us the way (Purgatorio IV 29/30), 'di viva speme,' 'the living hope’ that enthuses and inspires us, that we need to act upon (Paradiso XX 109), the love that turns the sun and the other stars, the eternal love that moves us and carries us through.
We are hearing the word 'disaster' a lot in these days of climate change and global warming. Now then, the word 'disaster' derives from the Latin 'dis-', meaning 'away', 'without', and 'astro', meaning 'star', hence 'disaster' means to be 'without a star'. Dante ends every canto of the Comedy with the stars. But the final verse of the Paradiso shows his real concern, the force behind it all.
'like a wheel in perfect balance turning,
I felt my will and my desire turned
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.'
(Paradiso XXXIII 142-146)
"By such a curse as theirs none is so lost, that the eternal Love cannot return, as long as hope maintains a thread of green."
(Purgatorio III 133-135).
Love may be hanging on by a slender thread these days, but there's more than a few of us holding on to it, and I'm staying green.
And staying real. This wonderful piece of work by Teodolinda Barolini shows the distinction Dante makes between realism and reality, showing that we mistake the Inferno as the most realistic and the Paradiso the least - Dante's realism reaches its pinnacle in the Paradiso, exposes a deficiency in human understanding in seeing the most immediate realism rather than true reality.
Anyhow, Teodolinda explains it better than I can here. I love this passage:
'For Dante the question of reality or being leads inevitably to the question of creation, which carries with it two indispensable features: creation requires difference, and creation requires love. The creation of the Many from the One – “distinctio et multitudo rerum est a Deo” wrote St. Thomas [“the difference and multiplicity of things come from God” In the act that we call creation, God made difference, in Thomas’s words, “so that His goodness might be communicated to creatures and re-enacted through them” (ibid; Blackfriars 1967, 8:95)] (ST 1a.47.1) – is described by Dante as an erotically- tinged Big Bang, an explosion of ardor that bursts forth into flaming sparks of being:
La divina bontà, che da sé sperne ogne livore, ardendo in sé, sfavilla sì che dispiega le bellezze etterne. (Par. 7.64-66)
'Spurning any kind of envy, Divine Goodness, burning within, so sparkles, that it unfolds Eternal Beauty.'
The “bellezze etterne” are unfolded in an act of love, an act in which the Eternal opens itself in order to create the New: “s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore”, 'in these new loves, Eternal Love unfolded.' (Par. 29.18). This act of primordial opening is a radical affirmation of being. The Transcendent chooses to enter the flux of time and affirms itself as the ground of all that is in the declaration Subsisto (the use of direct discourse is perhaps the most ancient of Dante’s techniques of verisimilitude, already present in the rime giovanili).'
Now that's what I call real. Unbelievable?
'Is the discomfort that many readers experience confronting Dante’s Paradiso the discomfort that many of us feel in front of a resolute and unblinking attention to reality?'
The 750th anniversary of Dante's birth in 1265 will be celebrated by the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania with an international conference on "Dante and Music" to be held in Philadelphia November 5-6, 2015.
It's all music - get in tune! Dante's poetry is music to my ears, both the words and the meaning they convey.
La mente innamorata, che donnea..
“My enamoured mind, which always lingers lovingly.”
[Paradiso XXVII 88]
Ne l'ordine ch'io dico sono accline
tutte nature, per diverse sorti,
più al principio loro e men vicine;
onde si muovono a diversi porti
per lo gran mar de l'essere, e ciascuna
con istinto a lei dato che la porti.
Questi ne porta il foco inver' la luna;
questi ne' cor mortali è permotore;
questi la terra in sé stringe e aduna;
'In that order, all natures have their bent
according to their different destinies,
whether nearer to their source or farther from it.
'They move, therefore, toward different harbors
upon the vastness of the sea of being,
each imbued with instinct that impels it on its course.
'This instinct carries fire toward the moon,
this is the moving force in mortal hearts,
this binds the earth to earth and makes it one.
[Paradiso I 109-117]
“like a wheel in perfect balance turning, I felt my will and my desire turned
by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.”
[Paradiso XXXIII 142-146]
Here is physicist Margaret Wertheim explaining why her favourite book is Dante’s Comedy.
In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing and the Mysteries of Love, by Joseph Luzzi
Joseph Luzzi’s wife was killed two weeks before their baby was due. The little girl was saved after a C-section.
A Dante scholar, the Divine Comedy helped him through his grief so he could be the father he wanted to be:
“He was a guy who had everything: he was a leading poet, a politician, he was living in one of the most exciting cities in the world and then suddenly he was kicked out and defamed. For the last 20 years of his life, he wandered around Italy, banished from his beloved Florence.”
How do we deal with loss, with separation, with a life in exile? How do we find our way back home? Where is our resting place?
“I read Dante at my lowest point,” he says. “It’s the role of great literature to be transformative. Dante in his darkest moments of exile created a work of transcendent beauty. It’s a very rich piece of literature.”
And that’s why Balzac called Dante’s Divine Comedy the greatest human comedy – all life is in there, it touches every aspect of our lives, the pages burn. And it is inherently political – as social beings, we need others to be ourselves, we need a good politics to have a good society and a good life.
Amazing site here put together with care, attention to detail, expertise, and love by Teodolinda Barolini, Lorenzo da Ponte Professor of Italian at Columbia University and all-round good person who makes it clear why Dante is alive and matters. Digital Dante I would particularly draw attention to the ‘Commentary and Context’ section for the extensive, detailed and insightful comments on every part of the Comedy. It’s all in here, and I can only express heartfelt thanks, appreciation and admiration for this entire endeavour.
Still unpersuaded? You may be destined for Hell. But before you go, try this article in the Independent.
Why is Dante still relevant? Because all life burns in the pages of the Divine Comedy, argues Ian Thomson
‘All life is written in its burning pages.’
‘In scenes of adrenaline-quickening horror as well as great lyric beauty, the Divine Comedy fused Roman Catholic doctrine with Classical philosophy and contemporary politics. Dante's influence in Catholic Italy has never waned. In the mid-1960s the poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini rewrote Dante's austere medieval poem to form a critique of Italy's consumer society. Published in the year of his murder by a neo-Fascist rent boy – 1975 – The Divine Mimesis bristles with Pasolini's abhorrence of American-style materialism and Christian Democrat-tainted political opportunism. Like Dante, Pasolini fulminated against politicians, grafters and humbugs who he believed had ruined postwar Italy.’
How about Dante and music! Of course! The Divine Comedy is an epic meditation on the human condition. But can it ever be successfully turned into music? Tim Ashley on the composers who have dared
"Most would argue that Dante achieved in a single work what most writers failed to achieve in an entire output - a complete, comprehensive statement on the human condition and on mankind's history, both political and religious. There is, quite simply, too much in the Comedy for it ever to be adapted in its entirety into another medium. Most creative artists contented themselves with basing works on episodes or fragments."
"Dante purists have long maintained that composers have failed to do him justice, subverted his moral vision and buried his work under the accretions of Romantic excess. Each age, however, re-invents great artists in its own image, and the Romantics found their own concerns, both personal and metaphysical, reflected in the anguish of the Inferno and the tortured grace of the Purgatorio . Few would doubt that the works they produced are, by and large, anything other than masterpieces, and a fitting celebration of the poet whom many regard as the greatest writer of all time."
'It has been well said that the study of Dante is a liberal education. There is, in truth, scarcely any subject of interest left untouched by the transfiguring power of that master-hand. Theologian, philosopher, poet, statesman, historian, man of science, painter, sculptor, musician, may all alike find an answering and inspiring note in the lines of the "Divine Comedy"'.
Dante's words that sing to me, and allow us
To walk again with the sun, moon and stars.
To the Mystic Ocean of Being
In which we live
“It is to that sea all things move.” [Paradiso, III, 85-7]
'Nothing escapes Dante's notice; and, among other things, the student is struck by the poet's sensitiveness to sound in general ... Dante had evidently studied music, and was accustomed to hearing it well performed.'
(Music in Dante's "Divine Comedy"
The Musical Times and Singing Class Circular
Vol. 36, No. 629 (Jul. 1, 1895), pp. 446-448).
Politics as music, music as politics – getting the One and the Many to sing in tune.
“Thus does the Living Justice make so sweet
the sentiments in us, that we are free
of any turning toward iniquity.
Differing voices join to sound sweet music;
so do the different orders in our life
render sweet harmony among these spheres.”
Commedia, Paradiso 6: 121-126
I’d just add, you really need to read Dante in the Italian, to truly convey the internal music of the man and his message and its expression.
Here’s my own homage to Dante.
DANTE’S ENAMOURED MIND: Knowing and Being in the Life and Thought of Dante Alighieri
Happy 750th birthday Dante Alighieri.
Dante has finally become what Guido Cavalcanti, his friend and mentor, said he was from the first:
"Dante, un sospiro messagger del core"
—"Dante, you are a sigh, like a messenger of the heart."
Take the heart-leap.
So how will our own stories end? Will our civilisation be, in a term that Dante took from Aristotle, a comedy — a story with a happy ending? Freedom, choice, political will, action, knowledge, responsibility … it’s all in the Commedia. And we have these qualities. A happy ending is possible, if we take the opportunity to use the freedom we have been given on Earth, make the right choices, join together and make common cause. I too believe there is a love that moves the sun and the other stars. Never lose hope and have courage. Dante, the man who lost everything and spent the rest of his life in exile, knew despair, and he knew it to be a cheat, the easy way out.
For:
"none is so lost
that the eternal Love cannot return
as long as hope maintains a thread of green."
Commedia, Purgatorio III 133-135
Decent documentary which emphasises Dante’s universal appeal, both popular and learned.
Dante's Inferno (1911) - World's Oldest Surviving Feature-Length Film - Alighieri L'inferno
Here I am:
The Dante Society of America, members list