Image: Martel on the vicissitudes of heredity: Dante and Beatrice hovering before Charles Martel, who stands within the Heaven of Venus, while below, Aeneas is standing before a Sicilian city, as three warriors approach.
There are certain things that annoy me. Like coming back from working all day in the cold hard rain and being met with this: ‘Dante has begun to be appropriated in subtle ways by the alt-right.’
Is there nothing that this age can't seize and distort, invert, and pervert? In writing on Dante, it seems I have to fight against people appropriating Dante to their perverted ends in peddling fear and hate and the critics who dismiss their 'medieval nonsense.' The former are an obvious menace to society, the latter a less obvious menace. Something I've worked hard for stands in danger of going down the tube as a result of this explosion of ignorance. It makes me fight back harder and state the case for unity and common good all the more against very visible and loud forces for separation.
Thankfully, there are scholars out there who can show clearly how the real Dante condemns all such peddlers of fear and hate for what they are - liars, deceivers, and traitors who do violence against life, language, culture, society, and God. It is precisely people like this that Dante condemns. Most of all, he condemns those who incite and enable them. It is noticeable that the Inferno is inhabited by the rich and powerful. There is only one person of common stock in the Inferno. Dante is not interested in the small fry. In fact, he is more concerned to diagnose the source of their predicament and encourage them on the process of healing their hurt. But they have to be willing participants, as pilgrims, embarking on the road that leads from confession and contrition to the healing of redemption. Phenomena such as this is very much the revenge on an age in which some of its most influential minds have indulged a post-modernism that puts ‘truth’ in inverted commas to render all transcendent standards conditional upon transient power struggles. Of course, it is met with the denunciation of ‘medieval nonsense.’ The idea that this crowd understand anything about medieval symbolism and numerology or about anything at all, old or new, is somewhat fanciful. It is drivel they spout, medieval or otherwise. I object to that drivel but I also object when critics of that drivel equate it with the medieval worldview as such. Such critics need to be a little more humble, not least because it is their modern world, which celebrates the freedom of individuals to choose the good as they see fit, which is generating phenomena such as this. Once value had been rendered subjective in this manner, it was only a matter of time before fact followed suit. We lost the sense of moral truth and knowledge long ago. The rest follows. I examine the article in which Jules Evans slams 'medieval nonsense' here:
It’s hard enough trying to encourage people out of their refuges and back into connection with visions of community and common good, without false appropriations which are the very opposite of the things being appropriated – namely Dante. Diabolic.
These people are the very antithesis of Dante. But this is what Hell looks like, a world of separation, hatred, fear, and distrust.
There is no punishment in Hell, only the penalty of the consequences of actions. You are not punished for putting your hand in the fire, you suffer the consequences of your actions. Dante’s God is a loving God, not a vindictive one. But with that love comes the free-will, which individuals exercise either for the good or the bad. Bad choices wilfully made have consequences, consequences for others and for society, but also for the individual chooser. In Hell, those who have chosen badly, and wilfully, are made to live through the consequences of their actions. These are a resentment, malice, and hatred which now reflect back on the individual instead of being directed outwards to others.
Dante presents a vision of what it is to be a free person in a free society, in open relation to others, not fearful relation. Heaven is a place beyond rage, resentment, and revenge.
Dante is all about what it is to be a truly human being, a social being, in a society of friends, a world of companionship. Hell is all about isolation, individuals separated from one another. Purgatory is the work of restoration, as those things false separated are brought together. Here is the place where pilgrims join together in common purpose. Hell is disconnection, Purgatory is reconnection, Heaven is joy in universal togetherness. To be a human being for Dante is to be a social being, a free being, a moral being, in a loving relationship with one another and with God as the Greatest Love of all. Dante’s Comedy is a love story. The sowers of discord and spreaders of hate take people and society to the Inferno and freeze us there in their malice, spite, and hatred. All that is holy and truly human is frozen for all eternity in the ‘eternal prison’ of Hell. To be human is to be in love with God and with one another in a commonwealth which includes all. Dante’s vision is indeed as political as it is spiritual, both personal and communal, but it is a politics of love in which being is expanding outwards. We are frozen in Hell when we lose the connection with something greater than our egos, the connection with one another and with God. Demonising and ‘otherizing’ fellow humans is diabolic, an estrangement, a separation, not only from those ‘others,’ but from our own true selves. As social beings, human beings need ‘others’ in order to be themselves. To God, there is no ‘other.’ Heaven is the place where human beings, lost and alone, fearful and resentful, inclined to project self-hatred on the world, find themselves at home, with themselves and with others.
Klaus Theweleit has written an extensively researched, detailed and disturbing study of the attitudes toward women and sexuality among German soldiers between the world wars. (Klaus Theweleit, (1987 [1977]) Male Fantasies, Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Klaus Theweleit (1989 [1978]) Male Fantasies, Volume 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.)
Theweleit's main focus is upon the German Freikorps. This was an army unit formed at the end of the First World War with the express purpose of fighting 'Bolsheviks', socialists and trade unionists along Germany's eastern border. However, despite the ending of the official mandate, many continued to fight as a vigilante force, in time joining the SA and SS, some becoming commandants in the concentration camps.
Theweleit describes this group as a dissociated, contingent body forming itself into a warrior body with the express intention of dominating others. Theweleit thus details the construction of the dominating body as warrior: 'The soldier male is forced to turn the periphery of his body into a cage for the beast within. In so doing, he deprives it of its function as a surface for social contact. His contact surface becomes an insulated shield, and he loses the capacity to perceive the social corpus within which his insulated body moves. ... A man [so] structured craves war, because only war allows him to achieve identity with his alien, "primitive," "bestial" interior, while at the same time avoiding being devoured by it' (1989: 22). In the process, domination becomes medium and outcome of the warrior body: 'What seems to hold the masculine-soldierly body together is his compulsion to oppress the body of another (or bodies, or the body in his own body). His relation to the bodies he subordinates is one of violence and, in extreme cases, of murder' (1989: 87).
Theweleit’s key thesis is that ultimately, the male soldier's hatred is not just directed against this group or that group, but against life itself, as productive and contingent. Subordination, violence and murder is directed against life as such. 'The monumentality of fascism would seem to be a safety mechanism against the bewildering multiplicity of the living. The more lifeless, regimented, and monumental reality appears to be, the more secure the men feel. The danger is being alive itself.' Theweleit (1987: 218). And those who make the best soldiers are those who most fear being alive.
Theweleit is concerned to identify what lies behind the lack which motivates domination. Through domination, society institutes within the body the disturbing psychic forces indicated above. Theweleit re-reads the biblical story of Adam and Eve as 'a failed revolution [told] from the victor's standpoint. For attempting to put into practice their slogan "Our bodies belong to us," the rebels were sentenced to a life of forced labor in the sweat of their brows. "Your bodies belong to your ruler!" was the response.' The 'prerequisite . . . for ideological assault' is to install a condition of lack in bodies. 'Installing dark territories, sources of terror and anxiety, in and on people's own bodies and the bodies of those they desired' creates the 'fear and uncertainty, of people's feeling that there were many places within themselves that no one could enter - neither they themselves, nor anyone else. Those were the territories occupied by the gods, the police, laws, Medusas, and other monsters' (1987: 414, 415).
There are monsters aplenty in the world of the megamachine. Each and all are being appropriated in mind, body and soul, enlisted in a cause designed to dominate and, ultimately, destroy life on Earth. The last word may well belong to one of the Freikorps members who, writing his own epigram and epitaph, could have been writing for all of us: 'Only now do we recognize how little at home we are within ourselves' (quoted by Theweleit 1987: 243).
I write on Inferno and make the point ‘God is not here.’ I see this appropriation by alt-right groups and state clearly and firmly: ‘Dante is not here.’ The Fascists tried it before, reading Dante’s hope for a saving leader as Mussolini. Barbara Reynolds resolved the mystery of the word ‘veltro’ – it is the felt for pressing the ink on the paper which presented the law.
The political message of the Paradiso is stated by Justinian:
"Love Justice Ye Who Judge the Earth."
Paradiso, Canto 18, lines 91–96
It is a phrase which comes from Wisdom.
The word ‘justice’ appears 71 times in Dante's Comedy and is central to its message.
The saviour is law, justice, as the form that love takes in public.
This is an entirely different universe to fascists, the very antithesis of a view rooted in fear and hatred.
Dante affirms Mercy as the beginning and end of Justice. Without individual responsibility in confession and contrition, all effort to attain justice is a cold and ultimately sterile attempt to balance one opposite with another, without hope of the unity which transcends them.
Inferno is an all too human ‘justice,’ a world of revenge and retribution. Such people are stuck in that world, and threaten to drag us all into it. That way lies not universal brotherhood and sisterhood, but a universal hatred stemming from the poison of a self-hatred projected as hatred of others.
Dante takes us to real human experiences and directs us beyond fears to hope for a better, more fulfilling life. People may be leery of a vision of a God-centred universe and its God-ward pull of the Love that moves all things. To that, I say there has been no greater critic of the institutional Church and vindictive, spiteful, and repressive moralism than Dante. But he doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. To take refuge in otherness, difference, and fragmentation is no refuge at all, merely an abandonment of the hope of every constituting a loving community of companions. Many shy away from the idea of a binding morality, considering it to be an invitation to totalitarian control. It has been. The denial of a genuine community is resulting in a fragmentation that sees social beings, unable to bear the weight and anxiety of living as choosing individuals in anxious times reconstituting community in ersatz and monstrous forms. How much better to understand that we have souls and that these are forged in the unfolding of a love story that promises a homecoming to all who are homeless.
Human beings ‘go to Hell’ by virtue of a false definition of what it is to be human. Human beings are essentially social beings, not self-sufficient atoms. Modern market society, set up in the image of individuals motivated primarily by self-interest, is profoundly dysfunctional in a human sense. Human beings are essentially relational beings flourishing only in a public life. Dante understands that there is no private soul. Our identities are the products of our wider relations and connections, in place, family, work, and polity, in institutions like church and state. To a significant extent, we are who we are because the people we relate to are who they are. Hence the complexities of attaining and maintaining the social peace, when the assertions of our will collide with the assertions of others. The challenge is to actualize a social freedom by way of recognising that in one form or another we are in a bind. Against the Hell of miserable isolation, Dante offers the hope of a rebinding through the creation of new solidarities. The God of Love is the thing which binds and rebinds things together into a coherent whole, with religion devoted to its true purpose binding the diverse strands of life together into one volume. (La Vita Nuova 2.4).
Our autonomy has made us negligent. We no longer see that the world is bound together by love and justice, just as we no longer have any sense of a truth or a good that exists independently of choice and will. We cleave to freedom as an autonomy that overrides obligations. Hell is the consequence of freedom as negligence.
Many are leery of a tradition that is considered to have divorced the soul from the body and inflicted a lot of harm to people. Me too. I affirm an incarnate spirituality, which is precisely the view of Christianity (on closer inspection, the dualism of spirit and flesh came from sources extraneous to Judaism and Christianity, from Pythagoras, Plato and Neoplatonism, and from the Manichean heresy and the Gnostics, reappearing in the Cathars and Albigensians (whose views were as hideously life-denying as their suppression was reprehensible - the world can indeed be a place of evil)). The task is to put all that has been rent asunder back together and give expression to humanity’s deepest longings, which can never be satisfied by the endless accumulation of material quantities. Some may prefer ‘true self’ to God. They are, ultimately, at the end of the process of self-discovery and return the same thing in the ecology of the heart. There are no short-cuts, no letting things be to become what they are. For Dante, love has to be ordered properly to its true ends. That is not a moralism, and to dismiss it as such is a fatal mistake which returns us back to the immediacy of – sometimes, often – erring inclination, causing recourse to surrogates. There is nothing more difficult than the process of coming to know who we are and be what we are, not least because it is both a personal journey and a social one undertaken in relation with others. There is a culture of character and discipline involved, the kind of thing which those whose taste is for facile appropriation to the ends of bigotry, discord, and hatred could never understand let alone undertake.
My hope in writing on Dante is that human beings will one day recover the love story at the heart of creation and come to appreciate the mutuality that is at the heart of everything — live, experience, and understand the meaning of all that we have to pass through. A soul is discovered in being lost. Rediscovery can take a long time, with deviations, detours, and short-cuts along the way. Stories have always to be questioned on account of the constant possibility of error. But the poetic imagination is still to be reawakened in order to open the soul up to new possibilities within unimagined futures. Dante is not a theologian in verse. He is poet. He tried instruction in the Convivio and abandoned it. The theology and philosophy were dry, boring, didactic, pedantic, and unpersuasive. Poetry brings principle to life. But there was purpose behind the aesthetics – he affirmed moral freedom and personal choice strongly – the much abused free-will – because he knew that that freedom – how little it may seem in the teeth of a necessity stated by objective fact – is the thing that makes human beings human. Unthinking individuals grouping in ersatz collectivities in order to overcome the fear that isolation breeds are at the very opposite pole of that moral freedom, and are the very antithesis of personality and community.
Dante was in favour of humanizing restraints – intellectual and moral virtues within the social habitus enabling their acquisition and exercise – as against the dehumanising restraints of a fractured society in which the good is merely a matter of choice, personal, but also collective, an assertion of will uninformed by knowledge of true ends. Dante exploded the false fixities of his age and gives us the means to blow them apart in this age of numerous false collectivisms. He did so to enable us to reconstitute commonality in a genuine sense, one that enhances rather than inhibits personal freedom and authenticity. He contributed powerfully to our understanding of what it is to be a morally aware human being living freely in a just society. A realized society of realized individuals as one and the same thing. For Dante, the soul was political and social as well as personal and individual. They are two inseparable aspects of the same thing.
Is Dante's vision of wholeness, unity, and harmony possible today? Very many struggle to even envisage it, let alone join with others to attain it. Citizens have become absorbed in private goods and have lost the art of solidarity as a practice. Modern men and women seem to accept the fiction that says human beings are discrete individuals who ‘naturally’ desire autonomy to the point of shunning commonality as repressive and demanding isolation as the freedom to do as each pleases. We are heirs to a tradition that deposed kings and threw off all collective forms in religion and politics as authoritarian. Freedom came to be re-imaged as the freedom from constraints, and struggles with ideas which hold freedom to be the conscious and voluntary choosing of legitimate constraint on the part of associating social individuals. The mentality that proved so acidic and subversive in relation to the feudal forms of authority that Dante’s case for the common life was channelled through, is also corrosive of attempts to establish new solidarities, socialist or otherwise.
‘Liberals have always known that absolute power tends to corrupt ... [W]e are now discovering that absolute liberty tends to corrupt absolutely. A liberty that is divorced from tradition and convention, from morality and religion, that makes the individual the sole repository and arbiter of all values and puts him in an adversarial relationship to society and the state - such a liberty is a grave peril to liberalism itself! For when that liberalism is found wanting, when it violates the moral sense of the community or is incompatible with the legitimate demands of society, there is no moderating principle to take its place, no resting place between the wild gyrations of libertarianism and paternalism.’
Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking into the Abyss, 106
The debilitating consequences of a freedom conceived in such libertarian terms is apparent as we struggle to muster the collective wit and will in face of a climate crisis. The free individual is free only of the constraints chosen as a matter of conscious will in ethics and politics, whether we see this in terms of a binding morality or the laws and obligations of a genuine public community. The external constraints imposed upon society in the form of the consequences of those discrete, incremental, uncoordinated actions will be found to be much more repressive and destructive. We have found that in becoming a law unto ourselves, we have found neither the freedom nor the good we sought, but a subjection to our own powers in alien form. This perhaps gives the clue as to why readers find the Inferno far more interesting, more familiar, and more realistic than the other parts of The Comedy. Even in its horrors, the Inferno is more enticing because it still feeds the illusion of autonomy. Here are the individuals who were undone by the wilful assertion of their autonomy. But this, surely, will not be our fate. We think that the various goods we choose are different, because they yield a certain pleasure. This leads to a certain nervousness in face of the unity and harmony of Heaven. Here is a good that all share. Individuals are leery of such visions of unity, binding on each and all, considering that one person’s Heaven will more than likely prove to be another person’s Hell. Plainly we have drifted so far from the good as to take visions of Heaven to be a utopia it would be Hell to realize, and visions of Hell to be the one and true reality. Dante is clear on this: Hell is the place of the isolated and unrelated self. The dominant liberal ideology raises this sovereign individual to the status of necessary principle, seeing individuals as pre-social beings who contract in and contract out of connection with others out of calculations of self-interest. For Dante, this sovereign individual is a fiction, one that is destructive of human society and relation and, ultimately, of human being itself. The abstract individual is a fiction that breeds its counterpart by way of reaction, the abstract collectivity and surrogate community, hence the idolatry of the state, nationalism, the false re-tribalization that affects the modern world. True freedom is found in the voluntary surrender to the Love whose service is perfect freedom. (Paradiso 26).
For Dante, neither the present nor the future were fixed, the choices that human beings make matter, and matter for eternity in being part of a never-ending love story.
The Comedy describes the personal experience of being exiled, lost, and returning home. There is no short cut to that homecoming, and those that take it remain lost, either as individuals or as parts of some false collectivity. The perfect circle of the unfolded rose is the place where the exiled come home. That is the place where the wounded soul is healed. This is a symbol for the age to wear.
'And man should open out like a rose that can no longer keep closed.'
Dante, Il Convivio 4.27.4
It is often easier to hate than it is to love; to love takes courage and requires trust. Those who take symbols of love and turn them to hate and division express the malaise of modern commonality and spirituality in a world lacking in wholeness and wholesomeness. The way back to reconnection requires attention not distraction. Let's call it, actively, attending.
Dante gives us a discipline and a direction in the educating of will and refining of desire. He teaches discernment. But he sets these things within a love story that highlights human frailty and foolishness, offers opportunities to learn by experience, whilst all the time honouring our deepest longings and highest aspirations. It is a story that offers a way to healing the wounded, the wounded soul, the wounded world. He appeals to the poet within each and all. The dialectic of Hell and Heaven plays out within the hearts of each and all. Which shall it be? Dante rejects the myth of objectivity giving easy access to truth and meaning. He doesn’t do what people think he does, and give unambiguous and unequivocal answers to the toughest and deepest questions. He does the opposite. He draws you out as rational and moral beings. It may well be that his true value lies in his questions rather than his answers, because he demands that we answer them in our own living contexts. I read a scientist say that Dante would have been better served had he written today, with our understanding of the universe, than having to go through all the contortions he had to with the cosmology of his day. That makes the point that the fourteenth century determinations with respect to the knowledge of the day can be discarded when it impedes the journey to healing. The truth lies not in the intellectual scaffolding, often a false projection of objectivity in pursuit of false rationalisation then as it is now, but in the beating existential heart. Quick and easy answers here divert and short-circuit the work of the soul in the struggle to find the true way. And it impedes the intellect too. People tend not to realize that for Dante love follows the intellect. His love is not some mushy entity, it is intellective. He gives us the intellectual love of God, which is deeply affective for that.
It is easy to present a picture of Dante as a stiff-necked moralist and authoritarian, as the theorist of the rule of Church (restricted to spiritual matters) and Empire (serving the public good). That’s not him. He was scathing of the Church of his day, and the way its interventions in politics poisoned its spiritual nature as well as the public realm. He denounced both for the way that they sought to appropriate God’s plan of justice for themselves – call that plan transcendent standards of truth and justice if you will. Dante cannot be co-opted by any particular group in politics or religion for propaganda purposes. Dante knew that all institutions and systems are subject to error and corruption. He ran the full political spectrum in his life to end as a party of one committed to justice for all. His ideal was one established by setting proper boundaries. But behind that theoretical definition is a passion for a human community bound together in religious devotion and commitment and political and social justice.
“Love Justice Ye Who Judge the Earth.”
That Justice is the transcendent standard of Heaven, incarnated in but irreducible to time and place.
Who wants to go to Hell? Some people do. Dante’s Inferno is populated by individuals who, through one lack or deficiency or another, chose to go to Hell. They offer their reasons, but there is where they remain. There comes a time for the inner work, but this is not merely a private quest. The Purgatorio makes it clear that this work is the expression of an inner longing for community with others, a desire to be in communion with others. Not apart from and against others. Something in the Hell of isolation forces us to take notice of three fundamental human desires: for the common good rather than merely private good; for open and productive engagement with the world, not its exploitation for personal ends; and for the embrace of our dependence on one another in commitments of shared responsibility.
Dante in The Comedy is not merely a poet, he is a pilgrim-citizen of hope lighting the way to love and justice for people who are lost in a fragmented world without hope. This journey is about experiment and experience, understanding that the truth cannot simply be told, but needs to be trusted by way of inner transformation. The work of reconnection is not just about learning to trust individuals but about trusting society, the world we live in, life itself – trusting that all these things are inherently good, and become bad by some distortion or deficiency. Dante’s Inferno is characterised by diabolic inversion and perversion, in a way not dissimilar to Marx’s critique of alienation and Weber’s critique of what he calls ‘mechanised petrification.’ The alienated society is petrified, a society of fear and hatred, loss, separation, and isolation. But for Dante this self-estrangement is rooted first and foremost in estrangement from God, and requires a personal moral effort to overcome. That effort is conducted in communion with others, as the Purgatorio makes clear. He shows the path out of the fears and hatreds into which estrangement drives us. He expands being outwards, to others, to the world as good, to God, and to our own true selves.
Dante’s poetry is liberating because, with a direction and a moral, it recognizes that the answers to the questions are not at all obvious. Poetry is not theology and is not easily reduced to being an instrument of spiritual – or political - technology or as a set of dogmas and rules by which to live. Dante had looked at Lady Philosophy and theology and sought to instruct that way. He abandoned the Convivio and returned to his first love, poetry. The religious and secular institutions of his day were going through crisis, as ours today are. ‘Apocalypse’ is everywhere. The end of the world. Apocalypse in its true sense is revelation of truth. Dante affirms poetry as the practical help we need to interpret the times in which we live and so come to choose the way of love over the way of crude power fuelled by fear, insecurity, resentment, and hatred.
“There are only two feelings. Love and fear. There are only two languages. Love and fear. There are only two activities. Love and fear. There are only two motives, two procedures, two frameworks, two results. Love and fear. Love and fear.” (Leunig, Common Prayer, Victoria, Australia: Collins Dove, 1990).
There’s a good rule of thumb to be employed here, in face of these attempts at appropriation – if there is fear and hatred, then Dante is here as a critic of their infernal condition. Dante recognizes human psychological and physical fragility and seeks to begin the process of healing. That process begins by facing the horror of exile, estrangement, and separation.
He chooses love over fear and hatred and enjoins us to do the same, with his presentation of the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. He inspires us to act with hope in troubled times, encouraging us to look to others as companions on the journey to healing, learning to trust others and trust that the world is good. Which is not the same thing as embracing anything and anyone, the very opposite.
In “Frankfurt School Revisited” (2006) Richard Wolin argues:
‘In their mutual aversion to transcendental philosophy, post¬modernism and the philosophy of ordinary language climax in an ungainly ethical and cultural relativism. Both approaches entail an unqualified defense of the "other" in his or her irreducible "otherness." But what happens when the "other" in question happens to be an unregenerate fundamentalist monster — the very embodiment of political repression and religious intolerance? It is on this problem that the happy relativists founder.’
Dante gives us a universal love story that sees other human beings not as ‘others’ but as potential companions on a pilgrim journey to the Greatest Love of all. The alternative is a world in which we remain on our own, free to make up our own stories, and choose our own gods/goods based on the divisive energies of race, gender, class, and anything else that may serve as a badge of separation.
In the Summer Meditations (1991), Vaclav Havel argues for the raising of the general level of public manners by way of a community of trust and the recovery of what Dante called cortesia (courtesy). Such a politics is of an altogether different, and higher, order than politics as a zero-sum game of winners and losers. Havel affirms the need for a transformation which unifies personal covenants and social contracts. Here, he refers to elevating the relations that exist among ordinary people so that trust is restored to social and public life, restoring good relations "between the powerful and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the young and the elderly, adults and children, business people and customers, men and women, teachers and students, officers and soldiers, policemen and citizens, and so on." (Quoted by Bellah, "Discipleship and Citizenship," 14).Havel goes further to question our relationships to nature, to animals, to the environment, to towns, to gardens, to our homes. His view envisages a politics of trust in which the state is the embodiment and expression of that trust.
“All my observations and all my experience have, with remarkable consistency, convinced me that, if today's planetary civilizations have any hope of survival, that hope lies chiefly in what we understand as the human spirit. If we don't wish to destroy ourselves in national, religious, and political discord; if we don't want to find our world with twice its current population, half of it dying of hunger; if we don't wish to kill ourselves with ballistic missiles armed with atomic warheads or eliminate ourselves with bacteria specially cultivated for the purpose; if we don't wish to see people go desperately hungry . . . then we must- -as humanity, as people, as conscious beings with spirit, mind and sense of responsibility—somehow come to our senses.'' (Quoted by Bellah, "Discipleship and Citizenship," 17).
For all of this to happen, people will need to come back to their senses. In an older idiom, people will need to repent, face the reality of their sins/errors, and change tack. Havel’s coming to our senses refers to the conversion and inner transformation that occurs through the purgatorial discipline of the mountain. If the religion idiom seems off-putting in these post-Christian times, Havel’s own secular way of putting it has also been dismissed as utopian. Havel admits the charge, and has this response for critics and cynics who have lowered their visions and hopes to the postmodern terrain:
“So anyone who claims that I am a dreamer who expects to transform hell into heaven is wrong. I have few illusions. But I feel a responsibility to work towards the things I consider good and right. I don’t know whether I'll be able to change certain things for the better, or not at all. Both outcomes are possible. There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.”
That’s a message to bear in mind at a time when certain folk are employing false equivalences in support of a blatant apologetics for a bad cause. In the words of Cornel West, “Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness is what love feels like in private.” His deeper message is: “It’s not about you.” His point is that greed and selfishness lie at the root of an exploitative relation to others and to the world and generate the distrust and fragmentation that send individuals to Hell – that make a Hell on Earth – and need to be supplanted by “unarmed truth and unapologetic love.”
Dante, are you out there? That describes Dante if it describes anyone.
The theme of exile and homelessness is central to Dante’s journey of the soul. In ‘The Comedy’ Dante expresses the pathos of homelessness and the joy of homecoming. The pain he felt at being made a stranger by his fellow citizens comes out clearly and the longing to return to his native city of Florence is palpable, but takes the universal as well as individual form of a return to our spiritual home. The exiled and the wounded need a new vision that sets them on the way to healing, giving them the strength and the will to go home. Dante’s great insight is to see that we are all the walking wounded, citizen-pilgrims on their way back home.
The image of the city was vitally important to Dante’s vision, in both negative and positive senses. The image shows us both the sociable freedom of Heaven and the fragmentation, isolation, and separation of Hell. This shows how a freedom understood as an autonomy from and assertion over against others leads not to Heaven but to Hell. This is why the descent down the spiral of Hell and the struggle up the mountain of purgation is crucial in the healing process. That process is all about restoration and renewal. On the last cornice of Purgatory we enter the Earthly Paradise, the reconciliation of Adam and Eve in the Garden. In passing through the fire of refining passion and educating desire, Dante recovers his birthright as a human being made in the image of God. The illusion of freedom as a self-sufficiency is shattered. Purgatory demands the recovery of civic disciplines, entailing the recovery of trust between formerly separated individuals in antagonistic relation.
Dante is at pains to point out that his journey is also our journey.
Dante is not a post-modernist and not a relativist, and neither am I. He affirms transcendent standards of truth and justice against conventionalism, whilst making it clear that those standards are incarnated in time and place, as the means by which to inspire actions and practices as well as hold them to account.
We need to be bound together somehow. We feel the loss of a shared community, but are leery of the terms of any re-binding.
This is where the discernment that is evident in the moral infrastructure of Dante’s Comedy is crucial, because stories can exclude as well as include, and the things which bind people together too easily become a bind which is repressive of freedom and inimical to happiness. Stories can confine us in that ‘eternal prison’ of Hell that Dante describes, as well as liberate. But Dante sets us on that journey in search of an overarching, inclusive, authoritative, and persuasive narrative that will inspire, motivate, uplift, join, and keep us together in one community.
How to do this without succumbing to totalitarian control is the hard part.
Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, Marx, anyone in touch with their humanity proceed from the simple assumption that human beings are social beings, needing each other within a genuine public life to individuate themselves. The age is making it clear that human beings, as social beings, are not meant to live in isolation from each other, and that the marketization and atomisation of society has produced a social, cultural, and political disaster breeding chronic uncertainties, feeding fear and anger, dismantling our sense of self. Dante affirms that there is hope. Disaster means to be without stars. It is linked with ‘desire,’ composed of the Latin prefix ‘de-‘, which means ‘lack of something’ and the word ‘sidus’ which means ‘star.’ Wishing, searching, longing for something literally means “to feel a lack of stars,” with one’s innermost being, a lack which implies a passionate searching for that which makes us whole.
Many are so lost, so hurt, and so angry as to surrender the will they ought to exercise for the good to cults and false collectivities. In seeking Heaven with like-minded others in the safety of the group, they find Hell. And inflict it on others.
Dante understands that the stories we tell need to be coherent and yet incomplete if they are to encompass the moral freedom which defines human beings. The stories that inspire us to act have to point to a fulfilling end. Many shy from the Inferno, thinking that it is all about religion and morality as punishment and repression. That is a common misunderstanding and describes precisely what Inferno isn’t. The appropriate term is penalty, not punishment. Actions and choices have consequences. Inferno reveals to us the way in which some stories end in frozen despair. We may take it as a cautionary tale to ween us away from the indolent notion of the age which tells us that, free from inhibitions and infringements, we make up the rules of living as we go along and all come to a happy conclusion. The results of that anarchy can be seen all around.
Dante understands that to get out of Hell, you have to face it, confront it, and go through it; there is no going around it.
Is it possible to make universal claims evoking to universal sympathies within the hearts of each and all without sounding – or worse becoming - totalitarian? Many have given up, and seek refuge in the fragmentation and disintegration of a permanent ‘otherness’ (with permanent protest against constituted authority as its flip-side). It’s a cul-de-sac. Such ideals can – without the necessary clauses and conditions in terms of practice and character and responsibility lead to the repression of others, and so people are properly sceptical, and inclined to retreat from the struggle to find the story that builds community and nurtures communion. A permanent retreat leaves us with an ironic liberalism which says our most cherished values have no foundation, but we can act as though they do, which works in a stable society protected by the state as a military pact upholding mutual treaties of non-interference. That merely entrenches and extends separation, a society of mutual indifference when it is at peace and mutual hatred when the divisions can no longer be mediated by its dominant, but ever weakening, institutions.
Can we be communal and plural? Yes. The Comedy ends on a plural. The poem proposes no homogenous unity and universality but shows how commonality enhances individuality, realizes (true) difference, and celebrates diversity. Hell is the opposite, freezing disconnection, fragmentation, and otherness as estrangement.
I take Dante to be a pioneer in search of a universal but non-coercive story for common living. A society of volunteers, freedom as wilful submission to the Love that enfolds, nourishes, and sustains all. This article is about the appropriation of Dante by the alt-right. I work the other way, and argue for the appropriation of authority, law, morality, and community not merely as conditions of a free, just, and egalitarian society but as dimensions of them. I call it ‘rational freedom.’ Once the purview of the ruling classes, I show that the freedom of each is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom of all, a freedom that can be achieved only in community.
Talk of love, joy, hope, and happiness may seem misplaced crisis-ridden times, but is precisely what is required if apocalypse is to be understood in its true sense – revelation of truth. This is an invitation to abandon the old certainties and securities that failing, fragmenting the world we inhabit, the false fixities of the prevailing institutional, political, and moral machinery, and embark on a new story as the expansion of being toward others, the world, and ultimately God and the true self beyond institutional and intellectual aids and crutches. This is to live into uncertainty and mystery as the protagonists in the story in the process of being written in a ceaselessly creative universe. The end of the story is the God who is without end and whose Love is endless. Dante understood the impossibilities of the destinationless voyage and that human freedom and fulfilment required submission to a supreme loyalty. He presents a love story that sees the planet as a sacred space that includes everyone. Some sense of Dante’s precise ideal of Paradise can be gleaned from the words of Thomas Merton, who wrote, "The more I am able to affirm others, to say 'yes' to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says yes to everyone." This is the celebration of mutuality in a common place where each is able to become his or her own true and unique self. Merton continues: "If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it." The quote comes from the book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1968: 144). There can be no standing by. Dante thinks ill of those who stood by and watched when the great decisions were to be made. But denying the voices of others is the road to Hell. Those who do make a stand and make a choice, and do so to deny the stories and presence of others, are also on the way to Hell and, unchecked, will take the rest of society there.
Modern society has lost the sense of the supernatural, that is, the transcendent and immanent reality of God pervading all of life. We are experiencing the fallout from our loss of this sense of the world as inherently and objectively valuable and good, and of ourselves too as such, seeing as we are part of this world. There are those who think that because we cannot know everything we cannot know anything for sure, and that all we can do is agree to disagree because there is no common good, only a range of self-chosen. Dante insists that there is a great Good and we are accountable to it. This is not the modern view. The purposeless materialism of a disenchanting science thought that there was a place where we could all rest "beyond good and evil," and beyond truth and falsehood. That is an idiocy that has brought us to a dead end. Weber took one half of Nietzsche’s challenge – the death of God as the death of an overarching and authoritative moral framework, believing he could hang on to notions of scientific truth. His gloom suggests he understood well the hopelessness of the task. The death of God changes everything, as Nietzsche argued. The moderns still haven’t worked out an answer to the question. In truth, many seem not even to understand the question.
So why are we here? Is there no reason? Just an accident, of no great consequence. The only meaning to the game of life is to stay in the game of life, knowing that death and extinction are inevitable? Dante says we are here to love and be loved. Hell is other people, said Sartre. Heaven is other people, says Dante. But Dante knew it could be either. He is a physician of the soul inviting us into community with others and enjoining us to search to devise and accept a common moral framework enabling us to order and enjoy our lives together.
It is impossible to understand Dante apart from the Love he believed to move all things and to sustain the universe. He was driven by the desire for reconnection bringing us to communion. His was a desire not only to reach out to and connect with others, but with all good things in the universe, satisfying our deepest longing. Sadly, there are those who invert that tale. Happily, there are those who are prepared to challenge diabolic inversion and perversion wherever it rears its head.
Dante’s great genius lies in his ability to tell a love story that inspires, orients, and directs within a definite form and structure and yet is left open to be lived and experienced in process, a journey from hurt to healing. The ending, if it can be called that, is in the hands of the Love which moves all things and in whom all endings meet.
“And in His will is our peace.
It is to that sea that all things move,
Both what His will creates
And that which nature makes.”
Dante, Paradiso 3: 85-7
I see other translations which state more directly “His will is our peace.” Either way, the lesson is plain – there is no post-truth society with God, the transcendent source of freedom and the transcendent hope that one day justice will rule the Earth.
The Jewish mystical tradition has a word for God that would have appealed to the mystic in Dante, “Ain Soph,” which means Being Without End. That name speaks to the overflowing generosity of the divine and the invitation to a life that is lived in a generous openness.
I end with Dante’s poetic presentation of the principle that lies at the core of an essentialist metaphysics:
Hence we read of Cato that he thought of himself as born not for himself, but for his country and for the whole world. Therefore following upon our own perfection, which we acquire in the age of maturity, should come that perfection which illuminates not only ourselves but others; one should open out like a rose that can no longer remain closed, and disperse the fragrance which is produced within; and this should take place in the third age of life, which is our present concern. One should therefore be prudent (that is, wise), and being wise requires a good memory of things seen, a good knowledge of things present, and a good foresight of things future. For as the Philosopher says in the sixth book of the Ethics, “It is impossible for a man to be wise without being good,” and therefore one who proceeds with subterfuge and deceit is not to be called wise but astute; for just as no one would call a man wise for knowing how to pierce the pupil of an eye with the point of a dagger, so a man who knows how to perform some evil act should not be called wise, since in performing it he always harms himself before harming others.
(Dante ll Convivio).
And who would not find the image of a person’s life as a generous unfolding of a rose appealing? It is better than cutting off from others and closing in on oneself. We have been living through, and barely surviving, an age of purposeless materialism. Dante believes in purpose. Life – the soul’s journey – is the generous unfolding of a person, the process of becoming in order to be. The purpose of the journey to Paradise is to unfold, and become like a flower in full bloom. Having shed all the dead weight that was holding him down, Dante rises by way of a levitational gravity to become what he truly is, unfolding to take his place, knowing his place in the . In the end, he came to know who he was and where he belonged. He knew that he belonged. He knew who we was and he knew that he was home..
In the metaphysical conception, a human beings is "designed" to open up like a great rose. Dante knows the metaphysics and expresses it in poetic form. He shows what is required to cooperate with the divine process by which our true selves unfold in the course of a life. For a rose to bloom, its roots must be nourished. Through the help and guidance of others, Dante was ‘brought back to his senses’ and to the home where he could blossom as a rose.