Dante: He Hath Seen Well
The painting is “Dante (He Hath Seen Well)” by Jean-Leon Gerome
I've seen some get this title wrong as "He Hath Seen Hell." Which would also be true. Of everything and everyone I have ever read - which is a lot - Dante remains classes above. He is the ultimate outsider. He wasn't particularly well-educated, he wasn't a university man. He wasn't very high born, either, but made it in the world of politics, becoming one of the Priors of Florence. I've seen critics dismiss his ideal as utopian and unrealistic by intellectuals and academics far removed from practical affairs. Dante was in the thick of the political action, even in exile. He knew also the limits of politics. The exilic vision brought clarity and objectivity. I'll swap everything I've ever written for the text I have written on Dante, it is my last and best word (or words, there's a million of them, hence the impossibilities of editing). Permit me to ramble on.
There’s a climate of fear and hatred arising from social division and diremption becoming ever more pervasive in the world. We live in the fragmented society.
We have never had so many paths to salvation and freedom. But no matter how hard we try to tie the threads together to form a meaningful whole, it all unravels.
“And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?”
- Leonard Cohen, Stories of the Street
I saw R.H. Tawney being quoted on the English Radical History page today, which caught my attention as a long-standing admirer of the ma. The quote was this:
“All decent people are at heart conservatives, desiring to conserve human associations, loyalties, affections. What makes the working class revolutionary is that modern conditions are constantly passing a steamroller over these in the name of material progress.” — R. H. Tawney
R. H. Tawney took Dante’s Paradiso as a model of a ‘complex and multiform society which is united by overmastering devotion to a common end’ (Tawney 1982 ch 11). Ezra Pound likewise used Dante as his inspiration when attempting to integrate the world and its politics, economics, culture into one vast poem. His failure was a demonstration of the impossibility of such integration in the modern world. Pound’s huge Cantos are a ‘jumble of detail,’ a ‘mound of potsherds.’ ‘I cannot make it cohere’, he declared in his defeat. (Vendler 1984: 143).
The reasons for this fragmentation within the modern world I discuss endlessly in other places.
I’ve always loved the words with which R.H. Tawney closes his book "The Acquisitive Society" from 1921. This passage, for me, describes the ‘democracy of place, person and purpose/function’ I argue for, the functional social order as the good society, and the attainment of Being through the realisation of purpose.
Tawney quotes from Dante’s Comedy on the power of love, respect for boundaries, ‘through which our wills become a single will’, and the peace of the blessed life.
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]
“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.
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.
That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels appears today; indeed, it is less rational, since the object with which it is concerned is less important. And it is a poison which inflames every wound and turns every trivial scratch into a malignant ulcer. Society will not solve the particular problems of industry which afflict it until that poison is expelled, and it has learned to see industry itself in the right perspective. If it is to do that, it must rearrange its scale of values. It must regard economic interests as one element in life, not as the whole of life. It must persuade its members to renounce the opportunity of gains which accrue without any corresponding service, because the struggle for them keeps the whole community in a fever. It must so organize its industry that the instrumental character of economic activity is emphasized by its subordination to the social purpose for which it is carried on.”
R.H. Tawney, The Acquisitive Society, 1982 ch 11.
I am sure that Dante would have loathed the abuse of the public realm and its corporate capture. And Dante had sharp words for usurers: ‘the usurer condemns Nature ... for he puts his hope elsewhere." (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, canto XI, lines 109-11.) For Dante, the usurer takes something fertile and productive and renders it sterile.
In our own time, humankind has destroyed wooded plains and valleys, polluted the seas and the rivers, poisoned the land and the air, damaged the hydrogeological and atmospheric systems, built on green spaces, and inflicted uncontrolled forms of urbanisation and industrialisation upon the land. To use an image employed by Dante in the Comedy ('Paradise', XXII, 151), humankind has through ‘foul usury’ humiliated the Creation, "despising Nature and her goodness" and destroying our sacred dwelling (Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans, by Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen Series LXXX, and Inferno, canto XI, lines 46-48 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). We may use the gifts of nature but have no right to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need but have no right to do any more than that. By taking more than we are entitled to, we are destroying our place within Nature and, as a result, are destroying our own Being. Stewardship begins with proximity, place, personal and co-responsibility based on a sense of owning both problems and their solutions. This has naught to do with external imposition.
Dante is full of beautiful, meaningful, words. Words that can sustain anyone through the trials and tribulations of life. In a world without books, Primo Levi linked himself to Dante. In one of the most important chapters in Primo Levi’s memoir, “Survival in Auschwitz,” the author attempted to transmit the poetry of Dante to a French friend, Jean Samuel. In a rare period of reprieve and companionship from the camp’s rigors, Levi recited Dante’s “Inferno: Canto XXVI” from his high school memory. Levi did not have the text and so remembered the poem only imperfectly, but in fragments. But you can make something of fragments if you have the root of the matter in you and cleave to the true, the good, and the beautiful, the three transcendentals that are the essential cohering principles.
Levi and Samuel both survived the camps and put their lives back together. Later, recording his memories of the event, Levi wrote that Dante made it possible to establish a link with his pre-Auschwitz past. Dante “convinced me that my mind, although besieged by everyday necessities, had not ceased to function. [Dante] elevated me in my own eyes and those of my interlocutor. [Dante] granted me a respite … in short, a way to find myself."
I can vouch for that fact. Dante has ever been my unfailing guide. Because no matter how bleak the situation, he touches you to look up and see a vision of a better life. Dante’s Comedy is deeming with redemptive possibilities. ‘We live in godless and prophetless times’ wrote Max Weber. Weber was a man without hope. "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 also the proletarian has lost his rights." (Politics as a Vocation).
Weber's "iron cage" of "mechanised petrification" in the modern age is redolent of nothing so much of the icy pit of Dante's "eternal prison" of Hell, Lucifer, the most beautiful and potent of all the angels frozen in immobility. Dante charts the descent to that petrification of the vital human essence. At the same time, he shows that there is a "something" instead of Weber's "nothing," a "nothing" that is in the DNA of a modern world living in the aftermath of Nietzsche's "death of God" (the loss of an overarching, authoritative, inspiring, binding, and obligating moral framework - and the concomitant death of the ethico-social infrastructure that comes with it and makes the transcendent incarnate).
'the mind of everyone who sees the truth
on which this argument is based
must, more than anything, be moved by love.
'This truth is set forth to my understanding
by him who demonstrates to me the primal love
of all eternal substances.
Paradiso XXVI 23-48).
'Here the higher creatures see the imprint
of the eternal Worth, the end
for which that pattern was itself set forth.
'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 100-116]
From my piece on Dante:
“Despair is the easy way out. No situation is ever so bad as to be hopeless. The looming ecological crisis is an existential crisis. It contradicts the promises of industrial progress. In resolving our relations to nature without, making our peace with the Earth, we need to relate to our own inner self and make peace with ourselves. Since Love is eternal, there is always Hope.
Per lor maladizion sì non si perde,
che non possa tornar, l'etterno amore,
mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde.
'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]
Dante writes of that guidance which gave me hope and showed me light. (Purgatorio IV 29/30). This is precisely the guidance that Dante offers us in the modern world - di viva speme, 'the living hope’. (Paradiso XX 109).
sopra la qual si fonda l'alta speme;
on which is based our hope to rise above.
[Paradiso XXIV 74]
I believe in 'attunement,' harmony. I examine politics and ethics – the field of practical reason – to discern the road to that harmonious order. Those are the hard boards you have to tread if you are serious about bridging the gap between theoretical reason – our knowledge of the external world, objectivity, the realm of fact – and practical reason – how we act in light of that knowledge, ethics and politics with economics as a branch of both, subjectivity, the realm of values, virtues, the motivational economy. Without the latter, the former is passive, idle, inert; without the former, the latter is blind, sefl-destructive in its self-creation.
I work for what may be called the 'democracy of function/purpose, personality and place' as against the democracy of irreducible subjective opinion. We can define the right order of right relationships, everything in its place and individuals working in harmony with each other and in respectful relation to our planetary home. I just worry how we can get people to see this and do this, how we come to constitute the 'happy habitus' (eudaimonia = good spirit = happiness as flourishing), genuine wealth as "well-being". Create social identities and patterns of behaviour so that we work for others when we work for ourselves. "Reason has always existed, but not always in rational forms” (Marx). What are those rational forms and how do they relate to social forms? How is social formation bound up with character-construction, communities of character and communities of practice, modes of conduct? I'm interested in creating the social forms based on right relationships so that we do the right thing as a matter of possessing the right character - virtues as qualities for successful/sustainable living. It would be for our own good should we be able to put immediate and transitory interests behind us and organise our actions within the big picture. But we only get the big picture through what Aristotle called 'concrete particulars'. We need to put it all together, everything and everyone in the right place, singing in harmony. I do believe this. I worry how we can translate that big picture thinking into politics, the world of social interests.
The musical model
'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).
The Divine Comedy is an epic meditation on the human condition. 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"'.
Here is physicist Margaret Wertheim explaining why her favourite book is Dante’s Comedy.
Shaw’s sharp, brilliantly engaging book delivers masterfully on its promise to fuel love for the Comedy precisely by dispelling readers’ anxieties, and showing how the great underlying concerns of this work are not only those of every work of art but are the stuff of life itself.
Dante’s concerns in the poem are those of any thoughtful person in any age or place: what is it to be a human being? how do we judge human behavior? what is important in a life or a death? Human behavior, our own and other people’s, is at the core of human experience in this world. A poem which encourages us to reflect on that behavior in all its countless manifestations will always be relevant.
Apart from the metaphysics, Dante excels on account of his sheer existential truth. I've been in more than a few "dark woods" over the years. Dante the unfailing guide has always shown the way out. He has done the same for others
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 Dante’s Divine Comedy the greatest human comedy – all life is in there, it touches every aspect of our lives. 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. The French poet and thinker Paul Valery declared that after Dante's Divine Comedy and Balzac's Human Comedy, it was time to start a third, "intellectual" comedy treating the adventures and transformations of human thought. I think you will find that that is precisely what Dante did.
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
And if you must present Dante in the Italian, the very language he had such a hand in making (you must)
Diverse voci fanno dolci note;
così diversi scanni in nostra vita
rendon dolce armonia tra queste rote.
Dante gives us a unity without uniformity and a diversity without division.
The problem with making politics the new god is that people will tend to see the other side as not merely wrong but bad, evil even. Politics is dissensus, disagreement, dialogue, and should never be theologized.
Is it really beyond conservatives and socialists to live up to their ideals and in the process find a commonality around the preservation and realisation of all that is decent, good, and holy? To once more touch the human roots that feed politics? To re-establish the conditions for doing politics well, rather than keep having to make false choices between those certain to fail?
God, nature, time, and place are the cornerstones of human experience and being. We live under the sway of an economic system whose success is predicated upon the uprooting and transformation of these things, presenting people deprived of their birth-right and denied their needs with surrogates that bear the same names and falsely promise satisfaction at an exorbitant price.
Cost-of-living crisis, failing public services, health waiting lists of millions, energy prices soaring, real wages crashing, housing crisis, huge gap between rich and poor, millions in insecure employment ...
Back in the 1980s I had the great honour of visiting John Ruskin’s cottage in the Lake District, Brantwood, on the shores of Coniston Water. Ruskin said that when we build, let us build as if we build forever. We don’t have to be an atomised, passive, and powerless mass but can institutionalise, embed, and live truth, beauty, and goodness. We can live in liberty by recognising a world that is greater than we are, expanding being outwards into communion with others, God, nature and society. And we can build, and build as if we build forever.
And if anyone has read this far and is wondering what on Earth any of this has got to do with R.H. Tawney, Tawney was a Socialist who grasped precisely what Dante’s political ordering of a loving authority was about, who was in touch with the human roots that feed politics, and was on nodding terms with good old Henry Dubb. Beware disconnection and democratic deficits.
These are the outlines of my four volume study of Dante Alighieri, currently being edited for publication. Vol 1 Dante's Politics of Love - from theory to practice; Vol 2 Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise - music and metaphysics; Vol 3 Dante and Rational Freedom - a philosophical and sociological analysis of infernal production, alienation, and rationalisation; Vol 4 Walking and Talking with Dante: Endless Conversations on the Unending Road - public and personal responses to Dante since his death.
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