DANTE’S JOURNEY
THE SWEET SYMPHONY OF PARADISE
“Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty – if we don’t understand, we just stay listening to the sound, and it’s like hearing music.’
• Roberto Benigni
I have been working on this book since early 2017, having to keep breaking off under pressure of 'events.' The book traces the musical model that runs throughout Dante's "Comedy." The text below should be read in conjunction with the accompanying essay, Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise.
These are the outlines.
BOOKS 1-8 (chapters to be determined)
Preface
1 THE UNIVERSAL POET
Why Read Dante Today?
Dante and the Italian language
2 MUSIC AND NUMBERS
Dante and Rational Freedom
Popular art and political intention
THE METAPHYSICS OF MUSIC
Music measures the relation to God
The influence of music in soulcare
Commercial Music and Soul Music
familiarity and vision – beyond realism
Plato
Aristotle
St. Augustine
Boethius
Ancient and religious theories of music
The Origins of Music
Walking with Dante
Pneumatological Effect
The Spirit of Song
The musical anthropology
Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature
The Music of the Spheres
musical references in Dante
The Church Fathers
Aristotelianism, or the Silent Cosmos
The Music of the Spheres and Dante’s Works
Political Order and Harmony
THE CHINESE BRONZE BELL
Political Order and Harmony
Platonic Ecology
the dancer and the dance – getting in tune
Dante and Music
Dante’s love of music
The Early Years
Music to Dante’s Ears: Exposure to Polyphony
The musical structure of the Comedy
The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy
Musical References
The centrality of music to the universe
DANTE AND NUMBERS
Language and Poetry
The Ecology of the Human Heart
numbers – ratio and proportion
numbers – Pythagoras
numbers – Plato
numbers - the Pythagorean tradition
numbers – numerology – St Augustine
numbers – Boethius
the virtue of numbers
numbers – Bonaventure
numerology in Dante
numerological thinking
physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim against Platonism
the innate love enthusing the numerology
3 POLITICS AND ETHICS
Disaster – Dante enters Politics and is sent into Exile
Dante, politics and the city
The True Definition of Nobility
Dante’s influences
Invitation to a Banquet
Injustice and Avarice
Political Peace: Dante and the Empire – redemption from within
Universal Government
Peace and government
Originary politics - the divine origins of peace
universal monarchy
the Empire as the impartial, disinterested authority
Universal Empire ruling in peace
universal rule in accordance with law
the habitus for rational freedom
The social philosophy of political peace
the social philosophy of the emperor
Dante’s ideal of world government in the contemporary democratic age
the ideal of political peace as an object of future willing
4 INFERNO
The Comedy
design and structure
The inner music of the Comedy
Real fiction
Justice
The Story Begins
Inferno’s Unholy Racket
Dante’s journey
Limbo
Hell
The Inferno – the world of anti-music
Dante in Danger
Dante the Taxonomist of Moral Order
Down into the Depths
Hell : Dante’s ‘eternal prison’ as Weber’s ‘mechanized petrification.’
Dante’s realistic ontology of good and evil
5 PURGATORIO
Purgatorio: Musical Liturgy as Pharmakon
The educative aspect of music
Casella’s song
Healing Songs: Music as Pharmakon
The moral architectonics of The Comedy
The limits of words
The redemptive doctrine of Purgatory
the politico-institutional architectonics supporting the moral infrastructure of free choice and personal responsibility
Close of Day and a New Dawn
hymns
Love, Natural and Rational – proper ordering and direction
The Christian Sibyl
Beatitudes and the Songs of the Earthly Paradise
6 PARADISO
Prelude to Paradiso
the challenge of the Paradiso
Transgression and Trasumanar
the possibility of vision transcending senses
Paradiso: The Attuning of the Sky
Polyphony in Paradise
Polyphony as Political Harmony
Beatrice in Heaven
Piccarda words - The sweet symphony of Paradise
Charles Martel – the exemplar of the good ruler
Harmonic Unity
Propaganda in Paradiso
Justice Realized
Faith, Hope and Love
The Empyrean
Song and dance – Heavenly Polyphony
The clock of singing souls – concordance and harmony
The vision of harmony
The music that is beyond rational comprehension
Beyond the limits of speech
The vision that transcends an earth-bound sense-experience
The theology of The Comedy
Eternal Love and Light
Conclusion – the musical journey
Music as liquid light
The Impenetrable Song
The Departure of Beatrice
the spiritual centre of the universe – the end of Paradise
The Vision of the Trinity
PARADISE AND LOVE
heartleap - love as the unifying force
Recovering the Wholeness and Wholesomeness of God
love as the answer
Epilogue: Poetry as real – the power of Dante’s poetry
7 DANTE AND RATIONAL FREEDOM
THE DANTEUM
Medievalism, the Hierarchical order and Fascism
The Danteum – the petrification of Paradise
the Danteum – the freezing of the music
frozen music as immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum
GOD
the two concepts of God
putting fact and value together
Beyond conventionalism, sophism, relativism, and scepticism
Restoring morals and motives
Creator God or Natural Creativity?
Transcendent standards vs conventionalism
Forbidden Knowledge
Beyond the Modern Gnosis
The secret – Recovering the Sacred as against Reinventing the sacred
The fulfilment of the soul’s desire as an eccentricity beyond control
Be still and know
UNITY AND DIVERSITY
political and philosophical implications – the politics of the common good
The Politics of Love and Justice combining the One and the Many in Harmony
functional order: the ascending theme of power and government
The ordering principle
functional order – differentiated power
the just society and love divine
Personal and collective responsibility
RATIONAL FREEDOM AS FREEDOM RATIONALIZED - Dante, Marx, and Weber
Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society
Metaphysical Reconstruction
Power, truth, representation
Dante and Max Weber
IDOLATRY AND FETISHISM
recovering the right relation to God
Personal and collective responsibility
Poetry’s origins in song
The creative universe
Poetry as physics, painting, and music
CLIMATE ACCORD
fire and ice – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity
8 CONVERSATIONS WITH DANTE
THE SACRED POEM – THE REAL AND THE RATIONAL
sacred poem – the real over the fictional
Paradise: the music that is beyond reason
The Sacred Poem beyond Fiction
The Impossibilities of Paradise
OSCAR WILDE'S DANTE
Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett – the Recovery of Hope
PERCY SHELLEY
The Paradise as the Perpetual Hymn of Everlasting Love
Dante’s Invention
Paradise Accesses the World Beyond Reason
OSIP MANDELSTAM'S WORD AND MUSIC
Architectonics – To Craft Beauty from Cruel Weight
Dialogic and Conversational Method in the Participatory Universe
Organic Holism – Diversity through Unity
Authority and Authoritarianism
Word Returns to Music
Mandelstam and Dante – Walkers in Exile
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN
Mikhail Bakhtin and the Dialogical Nature of Artistic Creation
Salvation by Surrender
The Need for Faith and Grace
The Creative Universe – the Conversation running through The Comedy
Dante the Conductor of Dialogic Transformation
Paradiso as Kinetic Ballet
Tragedy in Light of Beauty
The Constant Wish
HAPPY ENDING
The Choices we Make, the Ends we Serve
APPENDIX– textual evidence of Dante’s internal music
References to Music
Musical instruments
Musical terms
Hymns and psalms
Numerology
Music and poetry
Dante websites
For an extended discussion of these themes, please read the extended essay which is meant to be read in conjunction with the following full table of contents which follows immediately below.
Preface
1 THE UNIVERSAL POET
Why Read Dante Today?
The plan and the plot of the book; the essential themes of the book.
Justification
- to spread the message of Dante
– to encourage people to read Dante;
answering the ‘why Dante now’ question.
The question of being ‘out of date’; confronting the notion that Dante is ‘out of date’;
Dante’s continued influence and relevance.
Climate news – the endless writing of our obituary as the planet unravels
Dante inspires the new life – points the way to the new society; virtue and goodness; timeless ideals – the continued relevance of Dante’s ethics, political ideals.
Dante and the Italian language
Primo Levi – the sweet new style that saves – against stuffy stiff-necked moralism and moralizing translations;
the difficulties of translation; terza rima – impossibilities of translation; terza rima – the words that sing;
reading Dante through the commentators - there is no substitute for the real thing; Dante is difficult, but not as difficult as you may think.
Dante is an education, an encyclopaedia; how to read Dante – Dante as readable;
Dante’s uneven reputation over the centuries; critical rejections of Dante; Dante’s enduring significance; Dante’s works before The Comedy would have secured him a place in history.
Dante’s influences and intentions in writing The Comedy; Dante as a great poet; Dante encompasses all life; Dante’s Comedy is human and divine – combining the universal and the particular.
The Comedy as poetic creation; Dante remains cool in the midst of burning emotion.
Dante the uncanonical author; Dante and Averroes; the poem as sacred; The Comedy as Christian epic; The depth and richness of Dante’s poetic lines; Dante’s influence on Eliot’s The Waste Land
The content and range of The Comedy; the doctrine behind the lines.
Dante’s contemporary relevance as an analyst of the soul in the midst of existential crisis; Dante the psychologist and therapist – words for healing; Dante has the bedrock of personal human truth – Beckett, Wilde, and Mandelstam; epic poetry.
Dante’s opening line takes us directly to the human core; Dante’s characters - Dante embodied in poetry the entire gamut of human emotion in an encyclopedic theological and philosophical work; Dante as unorthodox in swimming against times and tides.
Dante: he went mad in his hell
Dante as Longfellow’s great liberator; Dante’s subversive unorthodoxy against Victorian stiff-necked moralism
the uncanonical Dante: Dante and Averroes – Dante the interweaver
Aquinas, reason and faith – making faith reasonable and reason faithful.
Music and the arts – composers put The Comedy to music; Pasolini - the abhorrence of materialism and consumerism as well as of opportunism in politics; Dante’s influence on TV – arsy-versy world; weaving reality and unreality – contents and sources – Dante’s realism.
The choice of Virgil as guide and the nature of The Comedy; pagan poetry – Dante praises Virgil; the influences of The Comedy - a Christianity infused with Greek philosophy; Dante and the immortal soul; Dante and Catholic orthodoxy; Dante’s criticisms and The Reformation.
The structure and order of The Comedy; Dante asks the big questions in each book; The Inferno continues to have the greatest appeal – the loss of the metaphysical sensibility; the relation and character of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso; Purgatory – drawn into greater theological understanding; Paradiso as the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach.
The strangeness of reading Dante for the first time – Dante plunges us into reality.
Epic poetry – Dante’s opening line takes us directly to the human core; Dante explicates universal truths through personal experience; Dante as love poet - ordering love to its true object
Beatrice and Mariolotry – La Vita Nuova; Beatrice – to know and love the God one cannot see – Glaucus; The glimpse of the Trinitarian Godhead; in Heaven, where all contention is resolved.
Judgement and sin – the judgmental approach as contrary to Jesus; eternal damnation easy to imagine in an age of organised barbarism; Hell and hope – the positive message beyond the doom and damnation, eternal joy as well as punishment.
Dante as an inherently political being; cupidity as one of the most ruinous of sins; roman empire – Dante’s commitment to universal government;
recovering the political and ethical commons – the need for public authority; the need for government; beyond systems to practical reason in forming genuine public community – commoners need public community.
The need for a vision of the future as an object of willing.
The Poet of Popes - The Catholicism of the man who sent Popes to Hell
2 MUSIC AND NUMBERS
The right order of things – restoring hope and connection.
The theme of the musical model - order and disclosure vs imposure.
The location of Dante within the radical ‘ought to be’ of philosophy.
Diverse parts are infused by the unity of the ultimate end.
Essentialist metaphysics vs plasticity, construction, and unbounded self-creation.
The clash between Thrasymachus and Plato
The true and right order of things as against inversion and perversion; disclosure vs imposure - praxis-based projections of value and meaning; disclosure and imposure – the obsessive impulse to control; the objective standard for evaluating human thoughts and actions, the truth that binds each and all; absolute truth is an attribute of absolute being.
Marx modeled the social Hell of the capital system upon Dante’s Inferno; how we may come to avoid Hell and what we must do to enter Paradise – the utopian ‘ought to be’ political ideals.
The cosmic longing for meaning and the search for the good life.
The transformative power of the Greater Love
RATIONAL FREEDOM
I present this introductory in recognition of the need for an early foundational chapter on Rational Freedom. Rational Freedom is essential in establishing the ethical and philosophical foundation of Dante’s conception. Putting these foundations in place makes it possible to return to and develop ‘rational’ themes in specific reference to Dante as the text proceeds.
This introductory is a general presentation of Dante in relation to the idea of Rational Freedom. This short presentation introduces ‘rational’ themes concisely as a foundation chapter in ethics, politics, and philosophy. I develop these themes throughout in relation to Dante’s own words and ideas
Dante and Rational Freedom
Rational freedom in ancient philosophy; Rousseau; From Hegel to Marx; Habermas and rational freedom.
Rational Freedom as an ethic of unity for the long range good; rights – overcoming separation; the relation of Marx to traditional ethics – Dante and Rational Freedom.
Dante in the age of ecology – need for collaboration, coordination, and concertation
Dante and RF – the common good; loss of universalism – time of crisis – the age of collapsing institutions and assumptions – need for recovery; politics and Dante – long and short game – long and short sight; securing human sociability and rationality in a world subject to other than social and other than rational forces; veltro – law as the earthly reformer; the veltro – law - a leader who was to bring peace and order to the world.
Popular art and political intention - Dante's public concern
The human comedy; Dante’s diversity and democracy; Dante covers the range of humanity and human emotions; Dante’s combination of qualities – message and mission.
Democratizing writing; the relationship between contemplation and action – Plato – public concern and democratic intent; Dante’s concern with the here and now (Blake’s accusation of atheism).
Philosophical anthropology
Dante’s political concern; Dante the earthly citizen – the participant and communicant – Dante the educator, the man with a moral and instructive purpose; Dante’s concern with the public – Dante’s public intention; virtues as moral values - This public intention comes out even more in Il Convivio.
Dante’s practical political concern and democratic spirit.
THE METAPHYSICS OF MUSIC
The following contains three sections in the one:
1) the metaphysics of music; 2) the music of the spheres; 3) political order and harmony.
The musico-moral metaphysic
The relation of music and morals
Music measures the relation to God
Music brings us to the order and reason inherent in the world; the musical thread running through The Comedy; Dante weaves an auditory experience into his tale.
The well-tempered harmony
The proper ordering of the universe; the power of both words and music to transfigure existence.
Why Dante now?
realism and ecological catastrophe;
the dialectic of corporeal usury and spiritual appreciation in a time of ecological crisis.
The influence of music in moral and character formation.
The influence of music in soulcare
Music is an integral component of a healthy and functioning civilization.
Commercial Music and Soul Music
Good music leads to the formation of good characters and the creation and maintenance of good societies.
The spiritual path leading pilgrims back to God – metaphors and the human journey; love and knowledge.
Music has the power to draw us to salvation; it also have the power to divert and distract us from that higher power. What is music? Against mechanized society and the reduction of quality to quantity.
familiarity and vision – going beyond realism to reality
Vision - to see beyond narrowed horizons
Dante’s ‘eternal prison’ of Hell; evil is repetitive, mechanical, soulless, enervating - immobilised power sweet symphony.
Plato
The desire to produce 'eternity' – Plato and art; the rise and fall of good music was directly connected to the fate of its society; ‘unmusical anarchy’ as likely to bring down the social order.
Aristotle
The power of music to influence the moral character of persons and of society; music is integral to the high cultural and artistic content characteristic of the good life; the arts are not merely 'entertainment' but exercise a formative influence.
St. Augustine
Music has an educative function in imparting deeper truths and values; Plato, Augustine, and singing to God; A love and a joy that is ‘beyond all words.’
Boethius
the principles of music; musica mundana, musica humana, and musica instrumentalis; Boethius’ cosmic music, therefore, integrates heavenly and earthly realms in an attunement; Music is an integral component of personal growth, the morality of society, the character and health of civilisation and, ultimately, of salvation.
Ancient and religious theories of music
Music disposes persons in the acquisition of virtue and vice.
The Origins of Music
the relation between biological and cultural evolution; nature and art; the universal language of beauty; Music is an innate and universal grammar; Music goes directly to the ecology of the human heart; the music that goes direct, beyond mediation of words and symbols.
The connection between music and moral formation.
Whitman - music is the profoundest expression of nature; musical grammar – introductory rationale.
Walking with Dante
The pace and rhythm of walking – getting back on our feet to recover our dancing grounds.
The Origins of Music
The music of poetry; the musical origins of language and poetry; the Singing Neanderthals; the need to communicate and engage in intercourse; evolutionary theory of music and language; origins of music – the needs of the social group; personal origins of music; the singing body; The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Music.
Pneumatological Effect
The pneumatological effect – the spiritual power of music; vocal music began as an attempt to communicate with the supernatural, collective music as religious music – the fracturing of the collectivity as diabolical; Rousseau – music as a derivative of the ungovernable emotions – music as the heart’s desire; musical instruments as artifacts; poetry and music are wedded – melody = melos, denoting both lyric poetry and the music to which the poem was set; music serves a purpose – an essential part of life’s flourishing – relations between people, a collective expression.
The Spirit of Song
The psychological and spiritual sustenance of music; music makes the soul sing; the attunement of mind and body; attunement - harmony, a joining together.
The musical anthropology
Music pervades God’s Creation; music as the only proof for the existence of God; music built into the fabric of the universe – creation and sub-creation.
Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature
music expresses harmony of the universe; the unity of the mental and the moral effect of music.
Victor Hugo on the power of music; music, responses, emotions; music and responsiveness – the failure to hear the music; the right path - songs of direction and songs of diversion.
The Music of the Spheres
The naturalist explanation.
Musical education; the cultivation of the musical virtues (as intellectual and moral virtues).
Both ‘Music’ and ‘Number’ are integrated under the heading of ‘The Music of the Spheres.’
Musical references in Dante.
The concordance which characterizes Dante’s Paradise exists as a composition of different elements in harmonic unity – lack of explicit textual reference to the music of the spheres in Dante; this section on the music of the spheres needs to be placed with ancient and medieval sources on music.
Music is filtered through theological assumptions and commitments; harmony derives from the Greek armotto, which means ‘to put together,’ ‘to assemble.’ The idea of harmonic unity attained by the convergence of different elements to a common concordant point.
The Church Fathers
Aristotle and Aquinas - criticisms of the music of the spheres; Pythagoras in the Convivio; Pythagoras; Plato and the music of the spheres; Cicero; The Church Fathers and the challenge to assimilate the Pythagorean and Platonic views into their Christian doctrine or reject them as pagan; St Basil of Caesarea; St Augustine; Christian and pagan philosophy on harmony; Regino of Prum; the Platonizing Christianity of the twelfth century – Peter Abelard.
Aristotelianism, or the Silent Cosmos - The Untuning of the Skies
The Music of the Spheres and Dante’s Works.
The Platonic roots of Dante’s thought; Dante’s integration of philosophical-astronomical conceptions within theological-liturgical theories of music; the case for Dante embracing the theory of the harmony of the spheres.
Political Order and Harmony
The ethical and political implications of the musical model.
This needs to be integrated within the Music and Numbers sections – The whole section needs to titled Music of the Spheres, taking in moral and musical education in the virtues, the nature of the universe, and the political peace.
Dante’s views on political order and authority need to be set out at length, first through the Convivio and then elaborated in The Comedy.
Harmony = attunement.
The Musical Model of politics.
Dante’s internal music and its political implications; music and the proper constitution and ordering of public life.
The Chinese Bronze Bell
The power of music – heaven, earth, humankind; ancient bells; society of ceremonies; music and good connotation – Confucius; Confucius, beautiful music and the harmonious society.
Political Order and Harmony
Order – everything in its place – seeing the world as one beyond time and place; political order – right workings of institutions.
Platonic Ecology
Pythagorean Political and Ethical Theory
The principles of harmonia.
The Music of the Spheres and its practical political and ethical implications.
This is linked to the sections on the ancient bells of China, the comparison between the thought of ancient Greece and China.
The Confucian Philosophy of Harmony
Attunement as harmony; music, numbers, harmony; music as the archetype harmony.
The Ethical Definition of Music
Differential harmony; Plato’s ideal of harmony; attunement with the grammar of harmony – the ordered world; deep harmony and harmony as conformity; deep harmony as open; Confucian, Daoist and Mohist Comparison; to achieve harmony as the ultimate ideal.
The operation of the universe; harmonization a virtue; harmony within society and between humanity and the natural world; unity and sameness - process of unifying people’s multitude of opinions into a common one.
The connections between ancient Greece and China, Plato and Confucius.
An argument for planetary accord in light of environmental crisis.
The crucial question of politics: how to bring the many and the one together – recovering the common interest; the perfect union.
The dancer and the dance – getting in tune.
A statement of the musical model in politics; attunement as harmonious relationship; Dante’s dance – Paradiso as a kinetic ballet; straightening out the ideological by way of the logical.
The musical model as tempering well; individual and collective agency addressing climate crisis; we live in a political world subject to ideology – asymmetrical relations; the hijacking of cooperative instincts; we live in a political world subject to ideology – asymmetrical relations; the world that transcends the political world, beyond social immediacy; ecological virtue changing patterns of behaviour.
A Platonic ecology; Dante’s poetry as physics – space exists as a receptacle for amplitudes; Dante’s puts writing on a par with painting and music.
Dante and Music
Unfreezing the movement within the architectonic; recovering Dante, unfreezing Dante; Dante as conductor of music; Marx and Dante on conductor and orchestra.
This chapter takes us to the musical model, leaving more intricate analysis of politics and ethics for later.
Dante’s love of music.
Dante’s great love for music; Dante clearly both knew and loved music
the symphony of the universe – getting in tune – composers set Dante to music; politics as music, music as the politics of harmony.
The Early Years
The theme of Dante and Music structures the argument and its unfolding; Dante was deeply moved by music; poems set to music; Dante’s musical exposure and training.
The structure of the musical transition in The Comedy; music woven into the fabric of The Comedy; presence, use, and purpose of music in The Comedy; the journey from a Hellish cacophony in a hopeless world to a Heavenly Polyphony.
Music to Dante’s Ears: Exposure to Polyphony
Abundance of polyphony in The Comedy; polyphony plays a central and systematic part in The Comedy – organum refers to a type of multivocal composition; the existence of a polyphonic tradition in Florence during and even before the Thirteenth century.
The relation between musicality and poetry - the ideas of order, harmony, peace, universality, and world government; music an aesthetic device and as integral to the design and the purpose of The Comedy; central role of music in The Comedy; introduction to the internal music, invocation for the symphony to come; the scope of the work.
The musical structure of the Comedy
The inherently musical discourse of The Comedy; The musica diabolic of the Inferno; Purgatorio as a musical training, an appropriate pharmakon; Polyphonic singing in Paradise.
The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy
Poetry written and recited as a branch of music; Dante has recourse to music and sound that words cannot express; pilgrim’s progress from Inferno to Paradiso.
The innate music of The Comedy: the structural relevance of musical references; Dante’s journey through cacophonic, monophonic, and polyphonic landscapes possesses an inherently musico-moral structure; The Comedy proffers a system of musical mediation; the transition from cacophony to monophony and finally to polyphony is a therapeutic process; Dante’s unity as polyphonic.
Musical References
Dante’s actual musical references; Musical Instruments as Allegory.
The centrality of music to the universe
The power of music to transform souls and put us in touch with the exquisite beauty of the world; the participatory universe of song and dance.
DANTE AND NUMBERS
Harmony and proportion as closely related to beauty; poem intended to be sung – music and number. The Golden Ratio/Golden Section.
Language and Poetry
Music and poetry; Dante’s musical architectonic; De Vulgari Eloquentia; poetry as metaphysics; poetry, music, and metaphysics.
The Ecology of the Human Heart
Dante and Guido Cavalcanti; introduction of themes by way of biography; song and dance; love and the gentle heart; keeping the heart fresh; music, morals, and motives – the moral-motivational economy of the inner music; centrality of the heart in the poetic process – transformative space.
Numbers and numerology - the arrangement of La Vita Nuova is based on an elaborate pattern; truth and beauty; the use of language and the role of words – mathematics as poetry; maths as poetry – everything is measure.
Numbers – ratio and proportion
Ratio and proportion, and of the principles of harmony.
numbers – Pythagoras
The concept of rationality is connected to the mathematical idea of ratio; sweet symphony; the 'Golden Mean.'
numbers – Plato
Mathematical laws and proportions; ideal forms; the divine Craftsman; the orderliness of the universe exhibits a beauty that establishes the model for rational souls to understand and to emulate; the concept of a mathematically based musical harmony as the great ordering principle of the world; frozen music - Scholasticism in stone.
numbers - the Pythagorean tradition
Scholastic philosophy and the cathedrals – the practical character of scholasticism
numbers – numerology – St Augustine
harmony and symmetry; numbers possessed divine significance as thoughts of God; unlocking the secret of the universe.
numbers – Boethius
The beauty of mathematical noumena and its permanence against phenomena; revealing the connections and patterns that run throughout the universe.
The virtue of numbers
numbers – Bonaventure
Eschewing mutable goods for true light; toward the perfection of wisdom – the mind’s road to God; symbolism, numerology, and prophecy.
numerology in Dante
The numerological architecture of the Comedy.
numerological thinking
Beyond the deceptive world of appearances to the underlying reality; the security and certainty of numbers; a Pythagoras for every age; a poetic ideal and a metaphor for a world singing in harmony.
Physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim against Platonism - making sense of an embodied science
Putting the worlds of fact and value back together; having a spiritual appreciation of the world; embodiment and immanence; integral thinking and collaborative solutions; the psychological and spiritual aspects of our being; the Eternal Quest for Non-religious Divinity;God as the creator of the universe and redeemer of mankind; putting science and religion together – the two concepts of God; the 'creative function of God'; embodied physics
The innate love enthusing numerology
Numerology in The Comedy; the cult of forbidden knowledge; conforming our wills to God as ultimate reality, not to soulless, spiritless intellectual constructions and abstractions.
Christ’s place … is with the humanity of the poets.
Dante takes us beyond the realm of reason, but not to irrationalism.
Seeing through the shadow of the real - one can talk about God only in what seem like riddles and paradoxes.
The scientific picture of the cosmos – the liberation from the stellar vaults of misplaced metaphysical certainty; the as a liberation of moral purpose from scientistic encasement; beyond "the science" to the anarchic excess of an eternal present as it unfolds into an infinite future.
3 POLITICS AND ETHICS
Dante’s contemporary relevance; Dante addresses problems of politics and the city, religion and theology, and ways of living; the Middle Ages as enlightened.
The peerless quality of Dante the poet; works before The Comedy; poetry as the additional element that leads to truth; La Vita Nuova, is a long disquisition on the question ‘What is love’; De vulgari eloquentia and the De Monarchia have a didactic purpose; Dante’s public concern and political drive.
Disaster – Dante enters Politics and is sent into Exile
This is an introduction to politics that proceeds by way of biography. This comes before the theoretical reconstruction and elaboration of the political in Dante.
The diabolic and the symbolic
Dante enters politics; the pull of politics leading to exile; the context of political division; the 14C context of political conflict; political division and dissension; Dante against the rich and powerful; understanding the theological background.
Exile from home; paradise in dreams – ideal seen in exile; exile – and the universal vision out of exile; exile brings objectivity.
Dante, politics and the city
I shall present Dante’s political philosophy before unfolding it in The Comedy. I propose to present the themes and principles of the political peace first, and then develop these in terms of the politics and ethics of The Comedy.
Dante the city man; the ideal city state as the ideal human habitat; the universal as a constellation of well-formed city-states;
The soul as traveller in search of the right path – Convivio
The True Definition of Nobility
The restoration of good society as Dante’s key concern
Dante’s influences
Dante reconciles various ethical and intellectual currents.
Invitation to a Banquet
Establishing the philosophical foundations through a discussion of the early works; the Convivio; new life; instructive purpose; a truth-seeker; thirst for knowledge; writing in the vernacular; the cosmology of the Convivio; allegory and history – recognition of meanings beyond the literal and actual.
The philosophical foundations of Dante’s views on politics
Institutional order, and authority.
Love – the song of the soul; the status of philosophy; philosophical and imperial authority as one; the reign of righteousness; perfect justice;
The unity of knowledge over democracy of opinion; the need to cultivate reason.
The True Definition of Nobility
Nobility, virtue and wealth; teaching the virtues; failure of inherited virtue; virtue ethics and moral philosophy; supplying the modes of conduct and communities of character to give the politics of virtue substance;
Virtue Ethics in the Convivio
The evils of wealth; inherited nobility; sound minds – the concern with character; the positive definition of nobility.
Avarice and Injustice
Justice, goodness and love; injustice and avarice; greed for money and possessions and the constraint of law.
Political Peace: Dante and the Empire – redemption from within
Empire and Church: the principle of universal justice as more important than its particular institutional manifestation in time and place; freeing Dante from his fourteenth century determinations; salvation within and without as both political and spiritual; Dante and humanism – the institutional separation of Church and State; city and politics – reconciling the universal and self interest.
Universal Government
Reconciling order and liberty; the universal emperor overcoming particularism; the need for universal government to overcome particularism and factionalism; universal government; The principles of universal government; man as a social animal; companionship; breaking bread; the need for the Emperor to declare and enforce law for all; authoritative force based on law and the politics of sociability; government and social ethics – achieving unity against dissension; The new crowd in Florence; the problem of quick money; after virtue; the politics and ethics of sociability.
The character of Dante’s monarchy; virtue ethics and character formation as the key to a civic republic; the conditions of monarchy as the ideal civic republic; the need for universal government is made on the basis of a civic republicanism; virtue ethics and character formation; character formation and virtue ethics; the need for moral formation; the need for world government to deal with collective problems and achieve unity; the issue of ‘globalism’; a monarchy or a republic; the limitations of hereditary monarchy.
Peace and government
They make for people to quarrel, and then feed on the fear, anger and misery.
This is the rationale that led Dante to the empire as universal government – from 14C context of conflict to the idea of universal emperor.
The necessity of politics: so long as human beings are around, there will be stakes, interests and conflicts; the overarching institutional-legal framework for peace – the political supremacy of the Empire.
Dante on Political Peace – setting out the philosophical framework first through the Convivio and other works, before elaboration in The Comedy.
The imperial peace as an ideal – transcendent standards vs conventionalism; Dante as prophet of universal peace; peace as the first principle of political welfare; the political problem and its solution - the context of division; the ideal of world government as pertinent.
The diabolic forces that spell the ruination of peace – the devil is all about division; separation and division – the context of conflict; unity out of conflict as the central political problem - war in medieval and modern times; war and its resolution; Dante identified the remedy for the division and disorder of his time in the principle of universal peace and in its institutional embodiment.
Originary politics
The divine origins of peace; the Gospel promise – peace I give you - perfect peace is the eternal bequest of God; the connection between political peace on Earth and the eternal peace of Heaven; the emperor as guardian and tutor – the divine origins of tutelage; essentialist metaphysics; peace on Earth – God as eternal peace; the peace of Eternal Light – liquid light; God as the eternal source of the political peace.
The universal monarchy
Dante’s hope for an Emperor to restore unity; the need for the one supreme ruler; the idea of Henry VII; Dante’s affirmation of a transcendent hope and standard; world peace under the imperial authority; the ideal political peace based on the eternal peace; the divinely-willed role of Henry; the institutions required for the delivery of peace; Dante’s letter to Henry; the ruler is charged with securing the temporal peace; Dante merges the figures of Augustus and Christ to justify the idea of Henry VII as the single universal Emperor who will free human beings from the political sins of cupiditas and the libido dominandi which undermine political stability and peace; the case for universal government.
The Empire as the impartial, disinterested authority
Having presented peace as an ideal and the social philosophy supporting the ideal, we come to the emperor as the universal ruler.
The empire as the transcendent third force; beyond politics as endless contention.
Authoritative and legitimate power; the Emperor as disinterested ruler.
The Universal Empire ruling in peace
The way out of the endless yes/no antagonism of a self-assertive politics based upon the creation/projection of meaning, value, and truth; the judgement to resolve conflict; the need for a transcendent third party reconciling contending parties; the single ruler to bring peace and reconciliation and to rule in justice; the argument for the emperor as the supreme authority checking common ruin through the contention of the parts; the single ruler governs the empire as global community of law and justice.
Contemporary speculation on the world ideal; universal community as a solution to alien power in the modern age; An ideal stands in need of a fulcrum of political action and social transformation in order to move the world; the universal ideal and its means of realization; economics and calculations of self-interest as the most ephemeral of ties; the conditions of unity.
Universal rule in accordance with law
The universal Emperor transcends self-interest, competition, and conflict; the educative rational force of law; the political peace of the universal ruler established and maintained by law; the universal emperor as the power to enforce but is bound by the transcendent ideal and by law.
Peace with justice and the power to make it authoritative and effective
justice as giving others their due.
The habitus for rational freedom
The empire creates the habitus for ethics as the rational science.
The social philosophy of political peace
Dante’s Aristotelian political philosophy in the Convivio; the social philosophy of rational freedom; Dante’s essential concept of human nature, government, and public life; the proper end for human beings as social and rational beings; the social philosophy of peace; the social philosophy underpinning Dante’s case for the supreme ruler; de Monarchia; the goal of human life; the ultimate goal and first principle directing the search for unity; rationality as a defining essential human characteristic; sociality as a defining essential human characteristic; collaboration of all humankind according to an overarching ordering principle; the need for a universal ruler.
The social philosophy of the emperor
The social philosophy underlying the universal community; sociality – man as the companionable animal; rationality and sociality leads the peace and law of the unified world polity; rationality and sociality lead to and require universal government; the universal Empire as a moral community – the moral union of all humankind; the extension of the polis to the world stage – the supreme community; the case for world government made in terms of Aristotelian social philosophy; universal rule as differentiated public community – integrating universal and particular; the unity of a universal ruler and the collaboration of all humankind.
Dante’s ideal of world government in the contemporary democratic age.
The state as ethical agency of the universal good – politics as difference and particular interests – the disinterested ruler (comparison with Hegel); universal monarch and democratic politics; the modern ideal is not monarchical but democratic – the formation of particular wills and groupings into the one common government; Dante and Maritain on world government; the contemporary relevance of Dante’s ideal of world government in a democratic age; Dante’s enduring relevance to problems of today - a peace that enables natural growth of the diverse parts as a mutual growth.
The ideal of political peace as an object of future willing
The danger of national rivalry leading to war; Dante’s ideal beyond uncontrolled national and sectional rivalry.
4 INFERNO
The design and structure of The Comedy
The architectonics of the poem; The tripartite structure of The Comedy; the three souls – reason above all; moral philosophy; the theology of Dante – God is to be discovered in human nature; action and inaction; the scheme of the poem; architectonics - categories and symmetry; safety, love and virtue; The architecture of the Comedy; triple rhyme; terza rima.
The inner music of the Comedy
The musical model
The internal music; central role of music in The Comedy; introduction to the internal music, invocation for the symphony to come; a moral architectonics possessing an inherently a musical structure; a musically dialectic framework; experience of music as spiritual; the inherent musical structure and symmetry of The Comedy.
Summary of the musical structure
the diabolic music of the Inferno, healing in Purgatory, and emanation in Paradise; instruments.
Real fiction
The outline of the narrative – continuous motion; the force of the narrative and power of story-telling; the reality of the story; real fiction; the naturalistic and humanistic realities of the story that reveal the transcendental substance; Dante’s poetic achievement; the reality of The Comedy – the psychic and historic facts of life; the appeal of the poem as rooted in human reality and redemptive possibility; the humanity of Dante; Dante maps the ecology of the human heart; the humanity that transcends dogma, the love that escapes reason; the gallery of portraits from Inferno to Paradise.
Justice
Justice as the purpose of The Comedy; the restoration of earth to Eden - the restoration of innocence after penance.
The Story Begins
The Comedy – the structure – rhyme as beautiful linkage – inner music.
THE INFERNO
Inferno’s Unholy Racket
The distortion, inversion, and perversion of music in the Inferno; liturgy understood as inherently musical; reversal and diabolic parody.
The hound that will destroy greed (the wolf) – law
Dante’s journey
midway through life – our journey – the right road; Dante funneled everything through the first-person singular, the famous ‘I’; Dante’s mission is our journey - the right path; the social nature of the journey.
The essential consistency and continuity of Dante’s thought – politics and theology; commitment to imperial authority as essential to universal government; the ways of committing error are many; justice and truth – gateway to hell and hope.
Limbo
philosophy without God; Dante places himself with the greatest ancient poets; the limits of poetry, philosophy, and the arts; What made Dante one of the greats; Dante and Averroes; the uncanonical Dante; Dante’s relation to Arab philosophers.
Dante’s rhetorical strategy - writing in the context of intellectual and religious repression; the philosophers in Limbo; Avicenna and Averroës at the end of canto 4 – the implication that philosophers and intellectuals form a community of rational thought outside of time and place; Dante, the immortality of rational thought or the soul; Averroism; Dante as uncanonical.
Hell
Where it all went wrong; hubris, the overeacher; the need to ensure order through proper role and function – Hell is incoherence, discord and disunity; God’s plan of just order.
The Inferno – the world of anti-music
Disharmony and estrangement; the antithesis of music; to be without stars; a world of disorder and disharmony, chaos and cacophony; the theme of exemplifying infernal distortion and disharmony through musical instruments.
Inferno – aural and visual effect; the anti-music of the Inferno; hearing drives Dante before sight, sound before image; cacophony as a primary element of the infernal landscape;
Inferno as the inverted parody of true music; diabolic mockery cut off from the restorative quality of music; parodic reversal; reversal in the infernal dialectic;
musical structure of infernal cacophony as perversion and distortion of true musical order; the infernal dialectic and inversion and alienation.
Dante in Danger
The enclosure of Hell – the unmusic of Hell; the metaphysical attributes of music - notions of true order, relations and reality; alienation as the infernal displacement of the natural by the artificial; the distinction between musica humana and musica artificialis as the distinction between the natural and the human, and the artificial and the instrumental; themes of inversion, instrumentalization, and alienation that it is hard to disentangle; diabolic inversion, Marxist alienation, and Weberian rationalization; musica instrumentalis; externalisation and instrumentalisation of originary powers; infernal musical production.
The Perversion of Sacred Chants
The inversion and perversion of sacred chants; diabolic parody – the miserere; from the miserere to cooperating grace; confession and salvation – need for grace.
Dante the Taxonomist of Moral Order
The moral infrastructure – vices and virtues – virtue ethics; Dante and eastern thought – the virtues as qualities for living; against frozen ideals; Dante’s true picture of human life; the reality of evil and the need to cultivate virtue; habits, virtues and sin; sin denotes a habitual lack of orientation; categories of sin – wrongdoing; the taxonomy of sin; Francesca - the clash between emotion and dogma – to be cut off from mercy by logic; treachery; Hell is for the ‘best people’, the great and the powerful; the Law of retaliation; Dante and eternal retribution; Dante the champion of vengeance; retribution – the contrapasso.
Down into the Depths
Sinners against nature - the usurers who committed violence against Nature and against God; sin – violence – nature and industry – avarice; sins and numerology; unity as the master concept – symmetry and harmony; sin of simony – greed.
Universal justice – the core purpose of The Comedy, the principles of justice by which the world should be ordered and governed; sorcery – the distortion of prophecy for avarice; money from public office – the politics of climate change; Ulysses’ act of arrogance – pressing knowledge and power beyond limits; Inferno – war and discord; schism – Muhammad – Dante’s excessive punishment; retribution – Ugolino - The Hellish nature of revenge as a self-perpetuating and self-consuming cycle; the revenge of Hell – God is not here; the paradox of revenge – Nietzsche, hell and hope; fraud and disease; towering giants – pride.
Hell : Dante’s ‘eternal prison’ as Weber’s ‘mechanized petrification.’
Lucifer as frozen – petrification the frozen lake – petrification; Lucifer embodies isolation as the ultimate and universal pain of Hell; separation from source and the overcoming isolation; Satan as lifeless and loveless – the frozen world; Hell as frozen; God is not here; autonomy and the modern gnosis - evil is a consequence of the narcissist desire to be ‘autonomous’; the neurotic compulsion to control.
Dante’s realistic ontology of good and evil
Satan and hell as one’s own creation; the cruelty of a society torn apart; Dante’s exquisite poetry of love, healing, and communion beyond political contention and retribution; putting the human world under human jurisdiction – learning to do better.
5 PURGATORIO
Dante’s dream of songs – Purgatory is the place of dreams; entrance into Purgatory proper as an active participant the healing in Purgatory; need for law and universal justice and government - truth vs realpolitik – Henry VII.
The transition from disharmonious noise to celestial sweet harmony marks humanity’s distance from and closeness to God; in the realm of hope, the souls endure their punishments with prayer and song; love of place felt once more in Purgatory – Hell is lacking the warmth of connection; Purgation is a creative forgetting beyond infernal notions of revenge, retribution and punishment.
Purgatorio: Musical Liturgy as Pharmakon
Purgatory – a seamless now; poetry comes back to life - the renewal of life; Purgatory - the system of purgation; fluctuating between flesh and spirit – music as friendship between body and soul; musical therapy as rehabilitation.
The human questions of the Purgatorio; the process of rebuilding in active obedience to the Law; fellowship in penitence Purgatory as a place of re-connection, solidarity, and movement.
The educative aspect of music
The educative aspect of music is demonstrated by the two songs of the Siren; music as diversion – the Siren – and music as pharmacology; the process of purification sheds the weight of sin; the deceptive and the salvific character of music; three categories of musical material 1) deceptive 2) healing 3) angels.
Casella’s song
Casella’s song as siren song – Ulysses; The three components of musica humana - soothing, worshipping, and educative/training/teaching; music can be so sweet as to divert attention from the message or true purpose; Moral purpose takes precedent over aesthetic delight; music can induce spiritual inattention – Mars and music.
Healing Songs: Music as Pharmakon
Prayers are sung in the Purgatorio; singing in Purgatory performs the function of spiritual purification; impact of music on mental and physical health – medicine for the soul and spiritual discipline; Healing Songs: Psalms; musical medication in the Purgatorio; In exitu Israel de Aegypto; The movement of souls is accompanied by the sound of the sweet harmony of sacred song; In exitu - liberation of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt – liberation from a state of sin; Purgation as a learning experience.
The moral architectonics of The Comedy
Movement in Purgatory: the dynamics of the heavenly journey; sharing in the highest good; Dante’s vision of a common humanity.
The limits of words
Dante establishes words and money as alternative currencies connecting people and places in different ways; The idea of words functioning as guides.
Prayers move and are moved by the greater Love of divine justice; Dante affirms the unity of words and music - giving expression to inner feeling.
The redemptive doctrine of Purgatory
Overcoming sinful innate tendencies; the ascent requires both human effort and divine support; the levitational "God-ward" pull free will and moral choice; free will – the cause of decline – cultivation of virtue – a free necessity; the cause of evil – the power of discernment between good and evil; the supreme good; free choice and its abuse.
The politico-institutional architectonics supporting the moral infrastructure of free choice and personal responsibility.
The need for law and the supreme good; nature and nurture; the human appetite requires education; permanence and power – the restraint of law, guidance by ethical models; empire and papacy; the right focus of love; proper use of worldly goods; love directed to right and wrong objects; insubstantial nature of soul beyond philosophy; art as ennobling but as requiring anchoring; poetry pointing the way to sacred truth.
Close of Day and a New Dawn
Peccatum, sin - need for guidance and instruction; the singing of hymns at evening-tide in the Valley of the Kings; the Salve, Regina in the valley of the princes; the screech of hinges at the entrance to Purgatory proper – the opening of the door to a better world.
Hymns
Te lucis ante is sung as part of a twilight mass; Te Deum laudamus; echoing the virtue of the sin that is being purged from specific souls; Beati pauperes spiritu, a hymn based on the first Beatitude, emphasizing humility, coda to the sin of pride.
Dante’s enduring reputation – the enduring goodness.
Love, Natural and Rational – proper ordering and direction
The natural propensity which inheres in all created things –this relates back to the moral anthropology established earlier through the Convivio.
The arrangement of the sins – love is the seed of every virtue and every vice; the ordering and direction of love; the distinction between natural and rational love; the educative role of Virgil; purgation as a regaining of the right order of being; proper direction; the poem as a song of praise; transcendence – fulfilment beyond restraint and containment; proper direction and use of energies and heroic models.
The Christian Sibyl
Beatrice; the Earthly Paradise – justice and the human potential; the last cantos of Purgatorio; the theological virtues; liberation from the three beasts;
The Gryphon; justice and its restoration; church and empire; God's plan of justice.
The final song sung by the penitent souls at the boundary of Purgatory, just before the entrance to the Garden of Eden.
Beatitudes and the Songs of the Earthly Paradise
Purg 30 - the penitential struggle is over, it is time for joy; the harmony of the polyphonous landscape; music beyond mortal understanding - announcing the qualitatively different nature of the music to be enjoyed in Paradise; Concordia; the connection between food and drink as divine nourishment and singing - the nourishing bread of angels.
Where Christ is a Roman - Beatrice’s role in the narrative is also to predict Dante’s ultimate salvation; In te, Domine, speravi; the sweet sounds of song evoking a longing for salvation and offer the distinct prospect of its possible attainment; The mystic procession.
6 PARADISO
Emanation in Paradise
Prelude to Paradiso
Plato on the creation of the universe in the Timaeus; tempering and order; ‘the attuning of the sky.’
The structure of the poem - Paradise – doctrine and example – the basic principles of The Comedy.
The challenge of the Paradiso
The Paradiso is the least read and most difficult; Dante was sailing into new seas in more than the physical sense – the geography of the soul; the theological questions of Paradise; the Paradiso is the most challenging part of The Comedy; the emphasis on experience.
Transgression and Trasumanar
Dante’s impossible transgression - he is going to see the face of God; Dante and transgression; Paradise as a realm beyond the normal senses; trans-humanizing experience is beyond language, intellect, and imagination – the failure of words; Dante’s ‘trasumanar,’ or transcendence above normal human experience; the instances of music increase in their frequency and beauty; attunement through the celestial music; transformation as transposition and transfiguration;
Dante draws all the threads together
The possibility of vision transcending senses
The bread of angels; the infinite in the Paradise; Paradise remote – but here we see the pattern take final form; the contemplation of the beyondness of things; the musical universe is held together by the cross; visions can be corporeal, intellectual and spiritual or intellectual; Augustine’s distinction between our present knowledge of God and a paradisal vision; the sacramental significance of a reality that is beyond the capacity of human expression.
Paradiso: The Attuning of the Sky
The musical model comprising musical metaphors; words and music move us into the silence; the idea of a heavenly harmony setting a template for harmony on Earth; Dante’s Christian the music of the spheres; the moral, philosophical, and psychic significance of musical metaphors - a vision of reconciliation within a polyphonic soundscape; polyphony as an allegory of harmony on Earth.
Polyphony in Paradise
Polyphony is Paradise – Glaucus; Music the tightrope between the physical plane and the metaphysical plane; The interimbrication of myriad references to polyphonic performance throughout the Paradiso constitute a complex musico-moral architectonic.
Polyphony as Political Harmony
The opening to Paradiso - Polyphony as Political Harmony - The two summits of Parnassus symbolize divine wisdom and human knowledge and the need for both.
Beatrice in Heaven
The poetry of spiritual gravitation; the formative principle of Paradise; the end of natural law.
The sweet symphony of Paradise - the words of Piccarda
Bringing truth to light; love and accord – wills made as one in the love of God; the cosmology of the Paradiso furnishes the canticle with its structural, moral, and aesthetic principle – orderliness;
Voluntary submission is peace – Piccarda; equality and hierarchy – diversity and unity; Piccarda – all souls share beatitude to the extent of which each are capable; freedom of the soul – the intellectual love of God; Venus and diversity.
Charles Martel
The opening to Paradiso weaves the political, ethical, and theological components of the poem and of life together; harmonic unity through plurality and polyphony; polyphony brings different voices together as one - Charles Martel, Dante’s exemplar of the good ruler, is introduced by a simile based on an organum; Dante the city man – Charles Martel – the city where Christ is a Roman - difference is required in the social sphere as it is in the metaphysical.
Harmonic Unity
The Boethian view of diverse voices joining together in harmonic unity; the idea harmony as political allegory; the musical model reconciles seemingly irreconcilable elements in justice; dance of the theologians – the double merry-go-round of rainbows – the two garlands.
Propaganda in Paradiso
Dante’s Roman apologetics; the political intent.
Dante’s infidelity as the earthly and interested man – prideful self-invention and self-worship divorced from inner nourishment – city of earth and city of heaven – Blake’s accusation
Justice Realized
Dante and politics – the embrace of the city walls exile attempts to reconstitute community – Justinian; Politics and ideal justice – law and justice - Love Justice Ye Who Judge the Earth; Justinian - the harmony that reigns among the different levels of beatitude - different voices rendering sweet harmony; Dante balances individual speech and a greater harmony; the virtuous unbaptized.
Faith, Hope and Love
The Empyrean
The creation of the universe; the acute point of light – Dante ascends to the Ninth Heaven, which whirls to unite with the Empyrean; the poetic transcriptions of contemplative truth - God’s glory manifests itself in the Empyrean; Paradise beyond nature and earthly physics.
Song and dance – Heavenly Polyphony
Dante connects music with dancing; ascending levels of joy, chanting verse and praying as a choral dance, accompanied by and in time and tune with music ever more sublime; polyphonic setting give a complexity but the texts are expressed in simple words - switch from words to music.
The love beyond proof
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – music more penetrating than poetry; the heavenly music of Paradise surpasses earthly music; heavenly polyphony as a sweet symphony of unity out of diversity; Sweet sound, ‘sweet desire;’
The clock of singing souls – concordance and harmony
Paradise - the canto of the sun Dante is no longer under the shadow of the Earth; Venus – the dance of the lights - the organum melismaticus; sweet harmony - the glorious wheel on the clock of singing souls; polyphony – the glorious wheel – the dance of the wise men in the heaven of the sun - singing is governed by concordance and harmony; Dante’s clock of singing souls is a perfect symbol of the notion of well-tempered order.
The vision of harmony
The vision of spiritual harmony; love and knowledge reconciled; rational freedom as deliverance from senseless servitude; the creative universe; the harmonization of purpose - continuous unfolding to a common end; the polyphonic fusion of voices into a unity – foreshadows the Trinity; renders the mystery of the Trinity polyphonically, as a unity in diversity – the double garland.
From this juncture in the poem to the end, Dante employs polyphonic music to express what cannot be expressed by words.
The music that is beyond rational comprehension
The inadequacies of word and speech describing the divine vision; it is in performance that we experience the truth; Mensural notation is the musical system used for polyphonic music – truth accords as sweet harmony; Osanna Par 28 - polyphonic performance.
Beyond the limits of speech
Entering into dimensions where verbal language is unable to articulate the poet-pilgrim’s exalted vision; the insufficiency of language, intellect, and imagination to predicate infinity requires resort to musical metaphors; the capacity of music to render the unintelligible in more comprehensible form; Musical metaphors and imagery therefore serve as a way of carrying a truth and a meaning that is unintelligible to the rational mind; preparing to receive the vision – Beatrice’s smile.
Without a message to convey, there is no language worthy of the name; Language is always pointing to something beyond itself; wilful distortion of the word - Preachers become peddlers of clever words and false pardons.
The vision that transcends an earth-bound sense-experience
Dante goes beyond words and metaphor to portray reality through visual symbols and music; the eagle symbol - Dante states the central problem of political philosophy – how to reconcile particular interests within a political community; To soar beyond the human; Music draws us into a world beyond our immediate senses and rational comprehension; contemplation more than human, the contemplation of the divine; the holy circle responds in wheeling and wondrous song; ‘Arise’ and ‘Conquer’; Gabriel's song to Mary surpasses any earthly melody; Dante describes the coronation of the Blessed Virgin in terms of a ‘circling music’; Heaven as a realm of song and dance, a realm so divine, so perfect and pure, that it exceeds the powers of human imagination; The Regina Celi; the geometer; the Triumph of the Virgin – the circular melody; the vision that transcends an earth-bound sense-experience and the need to circumvent the limitations of language.
The theology of The Comedy
The physical and moral centre poem of arranged intermediaries – sacred poem inspired by Heaven and Earth; theology and music - the power to inspire hope – the wish to come home after the long, hard years of exile; theological examination at the hands of St Peter, St James, and St John; the recognition of limits – to be modest within the gifts of created being; Paradise – the petals of a rose.
Eternal Love and Light
Conclusion – the musical journey
Music measures the distance to which we are estranged from or close to God; from the cacophony to sweet harmony; complete harmony through perfect union,
Music as liquid light
Dante's conception of God as light and God as liquid; the still, silent spiritual centre of it all – silence; heartleap; the fluid vision of Eternal Light in Heaven; the instinct that carries every part of creation to its appropriate haven; combining intellect and love in the One; love and knowledge – intellectual light.
The Impenetrable Song
The ascent into the sphere of the unintelligible; punto – the point that overwhelms Par 12 and 30; the end of the poem – into the light – the failure of geometry; sight comes to be ‘absorbed’ in the Eternal Light; squaring the circle; the recognition of the limits of our knowledge; a message that transcends language.
The missing meaning - Meaning is missing in the world as described by many a science - The more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is.
The ceaselessly creative universe and the role of human beings as co-agents in creation; the theology of disclosure and imposure.
The Departure of Beatrice
A new force – perceptions beyond the rational and beyond imaginative and creative powers; Paradise – difficulties of approaching transcendence – making the intangible vision tangible; mysticism.
Primum Mobile – model and copy – from time to eternity – intellectual light and love; the divine glory that is reflected back through the universe – the return to origins; imaginative collaboration – making meaning – to gaze lovingly – the happiness of creation; music on Mars.
The spiritual centre of the universe – the end of Paradise
Blinded by the light in the ninth heaven, Dante comes to see that God is the true author of the cosmos; Dante sees the universe smile;
God is love, a revelation that restores Dante’s sight;
Primum Mobile - Love is the spiritual centre of the universe;
a stadium for all the beautiful souls, a rose.
The Vision of the Trinity
The closer Dante comes to God, the simpler his language becomes; God is threefold light in a singular star; The crown and climax of the Comedy is Dante's vision of the Trinity; The entire universe is contained in all its diversity in God; Dante comes face to face with God the Creator; will and desire are turned by the circular motion of divine love; numerology – Trinity as the perfection of the number three; trinity – unity of reason and faith; purpose – to bring people to the state of happiness – Trinity the climax - mystical vision – transcendence – the divine light – squaring the circle.
PARADISE AND LOVE
Heartleap - love as the unifying force
the heartbeat of the supreme union that brings diverse voices together to reconcile differences and resolve divisions; Love permeates the multitude of spheres constituting the universe; the music of the universe, the heartbeat that unifies all the diverse phenomena of life; the Love that brings eternal joy.
Recovering the Wholeness and Wholesomeness of God
Dante’s achievement is to have integrated the two conceptions of God, the God of physical creation and the God of Love and personal relationships; real knowledge is a recollection of truths once known but lost and yet still held unconsciously; the journey reunites us with the source of Love; the reconciliation of the paradoxes and perplexities of our perspectivism lies in the realisation that the greatest profundity is simplicity: 'simplicitas Dei'.
The centrality of the heart in the poetic process – transformative space; Dante’s music – the transformations of power flow.
This ecology of the heart demarcates a transformative space that links trasumanar with the transformations of the heart; the centrality of the heart – poetry as a sensuous and spiritual experience; the sensuous connection to the world; mythology of poetic creation – increased perception.
Love as the answer
The power to move and turn; Love as the unmoving centre of the universe which moves all things.
Epilogue: Poetry as real – the power of Dante’s poetry
The power of Dante as poet; the sacred poem as a work of art; Dante as storyteller – the power of words; reality and belief – truth; real fiction.
7 DANTE AND RATIONAL FREEDOM
THE SACRED POEM – THE REAL AND THE RATIONAL
A sacred poem beyond fiction – real and rational.
Dante’s religious and metaphysical concerns; beyond words and music to the spiritual centre of the universe; Dante’s tale unfolds within concrete reality within rational and moral parameters; Dante succeeds in maintaining the real and the rational in close relation right until the very moment he brings us to the sight of God.
The sacred poem – the real over the fictional
The impossibilities of Paradise.
Dante does not make it easy at all for us, and makes no compromises
Dante’s invention
A real fiction that is grounded in facts; Dante’s impossibilities are not just philosophic and scientific, they are scriptural and theological; the impossibilities of Paradise – Dante’s devotion to impossibility.
Paradise: the music that is beyond reason
Beyond language; beyond the written form.
The innate music of The Comedy – the structural relevance of musical references; Dante’s journey through cacophonic, monophonic, and polyphonic landscapes possesses an inherently musico-moral structure; the diabolic music of the Inferno, healing in Purgatory, and emanation in Paradise; The Comedy proffers a system of musical mediation; the transition from cacophony to monophony and finally to polyphony is a therapeutic process; Dante’s unity as polyphonic.
The diabolic and the symbolic
THE DANTEUM
This material is difficult to integrate within a text organised around the flow of Dante’s own narrative. This works better as a separate essay in relation to notions of a properly ordered polity. This comes after a presentation of Rational Freedom and the well-tempered Political Order
Danteum – Medievalism, the Hierarchical order and Fascism
The organisational infrastructure of the Comedy are set out in some detail in the first book of the Monarchia; the divine unity of being; the idea of a functional order arranged in accordance with social purpose; the structure of medieval society, authority, hierarchy.
Dante as the culmination and transcendence of the Middle Ages; Dante the maker of the modern world – Dante the transgressor with respect to limits and withholding judgement.
Order and hierarchy – against frozen music – Dante as subversive with respect to medieval hierarchy and elitism; discerning the doctrine behind the lines; medieval order and its subversion; the hierarchical macro-structure of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; The Last Judgment is about exposing the hypocrisy of evil, not creating a balance sheet for sin and expiation
The Danteum
Unity and commonality in building the social architecture of the perfect society; the Roman Empire as an ethical agency bringing unity and order on earth; Paradise is a vertiginous height; the moral infrastructure.
The Danteum – the petrification of Paradise
The stellar prison fixates vision on scientific proof and necessity, the laws and imperatives of the physical universe; the immobile world of science/numbers is a frozen construction.
The Danteum – the freezing of the music
The balancing of the elements in this accordance or attunement; frozen music as immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum
The balance between morality, music and architecture
Dante as the equivalent of Bach’s universalism; Dante – the poetic equivalence of Bach; against reading Dante as ‘frozen music’ – against the tuneless noise of sculpture and architecture as mechanized form without content.
The unfreezing of Dante
The detheologizing and denumbering of Dante as a retheologizing and renumbering - from the dead and petrified to the living and vital in life's ethical stream; unfreezing the music conversation.
GOD
God and creative cosmology.
The two concepts of God
The Einsteinian "God"; God as the source of all physical motion in the universe and God as the source of love;
putting fact and value together
The accumulation of means and quantities, diminution of meaning – the capital system; naturalism, evolutionary biology and psychology; the human truth of ‘why’; survival; Camus, judging whether life is or is not worth living; successful living for the meaning seeking creature.
Beyond conventionalism, sophism, relativism, and scepticism
Unity requires difference. - supreme unity is constituted out of diversity and values otherness; from agnosticism with respect to the good to indifference – modern rights are grounded in nothing but self-assertion.
Apocalypse as crisis in the way we use language and signs; forgiveness, judgement, power; scepticism and relativism invite fundamentalism and judgment; the figure of Belacqua - a monument to scepticism between good and evil; enduring relevance of Dante beyond scepticism.
The impossibilities of living in the sceptical condition of Beckett’s world – you cannot live in indefinite postponement.
Restoring morals and motives
Turning involves the transformative power of Love; two concepts of God – fact and value; scientific knowledge has become the dominant conception of reason and rationality; morality relegated to irreducible value judgements; disenchantment and despiritualization.
Creator God or Natural Creativity?
Dante’s great achievement is to have liberated the religious instinct and the quest for meaning from the perils of indoctrination, from adherence to dogma and mechanical ritual and convention; love, faith, and knowledge; endlessly creative universe; need for immanence and transcendence.
Transcendent standards vs conventionalism
The ecology of the heart’s destination; morality in an objectively valueless world; rational community of co-legislators; the true, the good, the beautiful; reality and social construction; self-made self-legislating man – construction and valuation – the non-realism of the objectively valueless world; realism and ecological catastrophe.
Forbidden Knowledge
Dante the transgressor
1) forbidden knowledge; 2) the secret: against revealing the sacred.
human transgression and transformation: from Ulysses’ ‘mad flight’ to Dante’s trasumanar
The paradox of coming to know what we ought not know – the existence of things that lie beyond reason.
Dante’s journey through forbidden territory; Dante’s search for knowledge beyond ordinary human knowing – experience; experience and hope
Beyond the Modern Gnosis
Man as a rational animal – reasoning and the use of reason; full knowledge of things – the modern gnosis; the desire to know can become self-absorbing and self-destructive; Socrates and the importance of moral knowledge.
Dante and judgment – Dante the transgressor of boundaries in daring to know what one ought not know – the modern age as an age of transgression; responsibility and knowledge; are there things we should not know - metaphilosophy either leads us into an infinite regress or begs the question
The secret – Recovering the Sacred as against Reinventing the sacred
The language of apocalypse is the language of dreams as distinct from the language of rational calculation – the language of existential crisis; apocalyptic language runs throughout The Comedy.
The sacred beyond human invention; beyond self-choice in a world emptied of meaning and value; self-creation and ultimate values beyond choice and invention; objectivity in a creative universe; natural desire to know; knowledge beyond ordinary knowing; the limits to knowing, Ulysses; esperïenza, knowledge as experience and hope;
man is a rational animal – the nature of rationality
McFargue and monarchy; theological pragmatism and the monarchical model; presumptionism; Blake – art is the tree of life; Nietzsche - enveloping illusion; Nietzsche and disenchanting analysis; philosophical reason refutes itself; acting on our invented symbols – the ‘as if’ approach to reality; a more active and productive orientation to the world; every living things needs a shrouding vapour.
Socrates and self-knowledge, Frankl, behaviourism; Bacon and science; apprehending our invented symbols – living as if we knew; philosophical reason undercuts itself
The fulfilment of the soul’s desire as an eccentricity beyond control
Biology and science possess ethical and political implications; directionless, purposeless evolution and the indifferent world; necessary illusion; off-centre or not placed centrally; we should stop deifying our powers and instead start to humanize them; the illusions of being in control and of being in charge – letting go of neurosis.
Be still and know
Attunement with ‘the law of the immanence of the way’
being still
UNITY AND DIVERSITY
the universal is to be appreciated in the particular, and the particular in the universal; the form that makes the universe resemble God; an ecology of infinite differentiation in which each thing is valued for its distinctive capacities; a world in union and in motion; the intertwining of the real and the rational; the divine glory is revealed in the unity through diversity.
seeing with clear eyes – Dante’s realism over poetic fantasy
Political and philosophical implications – the politics of the common good
Each unique, individual being should participate in its own way in the divine Being; Dante’s unity of all things through infinite differentiation forms a community of life; the commonwealth of virtue;
The Politics of Love and Justice combining the One and the Many in Harmony
Individuals associate together, forming communities that build up to the one commonwealth; the state or public community as the supreme community of all communities; Light reveals communion as the purpose of the journey.
Functional order: the ascending theme of power and government
The implications of the cosmology in terms of political order; tying the themes together: Rational Freedom, unity and diversity, and the polity as functional order; the ascending theme of power and government; a humanly scaled society in which the self-organising properties of social exchange, interaction and solidarity, buttressed by communities of practices and clusters of co-operators;
The ordering principle
The ordering principle - all souls are equal to each other because they are all equal to the one thing that is above them and which unites them; the common end integrates unity and diversity, brings together the Many and the One, achieves the peace of one voice through diverse voices; diverse ranks coming to render sweet harmony.
Functional order – differentiated power
the just society and love divine
the freedom of each is coexistent with and conditional upon the freedom of all; the quest for the Just Society; Dante’s vision of a mediated society arranged in accordance with purpose and devoted to a common end; the contemporary relevance of Dante’s political treatise, De monarchia;
Personal and collective responsibility
Dante offers a diagnosis and a prognosis with respect to the forces making for moral malaise and cultural collapse
Individuality and sociality are two sides of the same human nature, they are not an either/or.
The character of the socio-institutional fabric is therefore a crucial part of achieving responsibility and adjusting patterns of behaviour to moral, social and ecological realities.
human beings are social and political beings designed to live in a polis or city-state, in relation to each other in a public community; Politics anchors us in a common life and common cause; a thoroughgoing transformation that brings about the Good Society; the ‘conviction that life is unconditionally meaningful’
RATIONAL FREEDOM
The comparison of Dante and Marx; the themes of inversion, perversion, alienation, and rationalization are traced throughout the Inferno.
rational freedom and natural law; Marx as the realisation of rational freedom; qualifying rational freedom by way of natural law
Capital as Inferno
Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society
The connection between Dante and Marx; Dante’s sins as capitalist imperatives; rational freedom becomes capitalist rationalization; Marx’s Judaeo-Christian allusions – overcoming the dichotomization of religion and science; Marx and atheism; Marx and religion – calling back the soul; modern capital is irreligious; uprooting the social inversion behind religious illusion
The moral dimensions of Marx’s Capital – Marx and rational freedom; beyond the dualism of fact and value, science and religion; Dante and Marx in exile; the need for a supernatural ethic; Dante and Marx as exiles able to see objectively; the connection between Dante and Marx – Aristotle and Aquinas.
Inferno as the hell of capital – praxis and transformation in accordance with transcendent standards.
The Comedy as a quest and journey - an encyclopedia in the sense of being a circle of knowledge – architectonics; knowledge, self-knowledge and the world we make through praxis – the alienation and inversion of the Inferno.
Aquinas and the limits of philosophical reason; purpose beyond the scandal of reason – the value of unanswerable questions;
Reality and social construction epic vision; self-made self-legislating man – construction and valuation – the non-realism of the objectively valueless world epic vision; locating value in the endlessly creative universe; the criticism of God and religion as acidic of all objective standards; reality over illusion.
Metaphysical Reconstruction
Realism and metaphysics vs post-modernism and constructivism; transcendent standards vs deconstruction; bedrock metaphysical apparatus and commitment over against self-creation; metaphysics is the scourge of relativism; Lyotard and grand narratives – the weakening of the metaphysical apparatus brings about fragmentation; deciding which view offers the more plausible account of human nature and life.
Power, truth, representation
Culture war; the connection of reason and faith in objective reality; the values, virtues and practices necessary to achieve and sustain communities of benevolence and justice; the good society which is in accord with the true nature of reality cannot be attained without a metaphysical basis in transcendent truths and norms.
FREEDOM RATIONALIZED
The critique of inversion and alienation, Inferno as Capital
Dante and Max Weber
Dante and the disenchanted world of Max Weber
IDOLATRY FETISHISM
The source of Weberian rationalization located in alienative relationships; alienation from people, from nature, from self and creative labour, from God;
Reason, right relationships, alienation and idolatry; against the new idols of alienated self-creation; the moral failure of modernity as an incomplete secularisation; idolatry as the re-enchantment of things;
Recovering the right relation to God
Asymmetrical relations of domination as a sin against God; Relations of domination and exploitation represent a negation of the other. Kant’s categorical imperative and Marx; Dante against the ethical anthropocentrism of self-legislating reason; God as the unifying transcendent principle capable of holding human self-legislators together; the experiment of the directionless and destinationless voyage and the Love that seeketh not its own; the instrumentalisation of relationships generates new idols; alienation and idolatry
Personal and collective responsibility
The rational reconstruction of the socio-institutional matrix within which individuals relate together and act; the praxis of domination – sin as structural oppression; totalizing the relative, instrumentalizing the other, and divinizing the self; individuals and institutions.
Osip Mandelstam, vindicating Dante in the modern world
Mandelstam biography; Conversation on Dante - reflections on the nature of the poetic process; the analogical method – comparison and simile; Dante is the Descartes of metaphor and simile; dialogic and conversational method in the participatory universe
Mandelstam’s Conversation is an elaboration of a poetics inspired by Dante; politics and poetry; Mandelstam always carried Dante’s Comedy
Mandelstam shared Dante’s fate in exile; Dante the walker in exile – Dante’s ‘endless labour’; Mandelstam and Dante – walkers in exile – Beethoven as walker measuring the fields and woods.
The Acmeist school - compactness of form and clarity of expression; Mandelstam demands formal elegance; Mandelstam’s sense of renewal and transcendence making available uncharted territory – Dante a man for all time; architectonics – to craft beauty from cruel weight; Dante as the equivalent of Bach’s universalism conversation; Dante – the poetic equivalence of Bach – put with Bach above conversation; against Dante as ‘frozen music’ – against the tuneless noise of sculpture and architecture as mechanized form without content conversation
architectonics - form and content – The Comedy as a single unifying stanza conversation Dante against mysticism and for clarity – the concern to inform and educate; seeing with clear eyes; poetic discourse - the mutation of instruments into harmony.
The musicality of the Italian language; Dante’s erudition as ‘unceasing sound’
knowledge beyond reason – Kant and the scandal of reason – the clash between reality and intellect
Dante fashions the tools to deal with the challenge; the need for metaphor to apprehend Dante’s metareal vision; Dante’s organic holism - diversity through unity; the bee analogy – the creative universe
Dante’s similes are never descriptive; Dante and the natural sciences bringing us to reality – visionary materialism; heraldic symbols – Dante as a friend of painters; The cello – diversity by way of analogy with the orchestra.
Dante and True Authority
The prison as metaphor and reality; The political world as Hell on Earth – Dante and the city - the diabolical nature of politics; authority and authoritarianism – Mandelstam’s fate; to be herded in a herd – the compartmentalisation of atrocity and the inability to see beyond the particularity of plight; the aim was to destroy not merely people but hope and the idea.
Mandelstam on authority; a society properly ordered in accordance with justice; Dante looks forwards to a new universal authority – missiles for capturing the future; Dante calls to the future; Dante’s subversive demand for a true form of authority; Mandelstam’s case for authority; dialogical and monological authority; authority and diversity; example and experiment.
Mandelstam’s arguments can be used to counter attempts to deconstruct Dante; authority over the cacophony of different voices; Mandelstam as a love poet – the architectonic infused with love; to learn by experience the truth poets deliver by art.
Word, Return to Music
Mikhail Bakhtin and the dialogical nature of artistic creation – language an expression of social identity; social and dialogic nature - an appreciation of the religious and the metaphysical; materialist immanence; doing justice to our dialogic natures – dialogue and monologue; the poetic art as heroic activity – sub-creation in a creative universe.
Where does value lie; salvation by voluntary surrender;
Transference to the most transcendent thing imaginable; the need for faith – faith is a matter of grace – we created God to save the world from nothingness; self-created gods and the creative universe
Dante’s hopeful attitude amidst the worst of times
Poetry’s origins in song
Music as divine fullness, divine nature of music; composers have set Dante to music; wedding poetry and music – engaging all the senses; silence is music – word is to return to music.
Bach and Beethoven - the organized resistance of the spirit against the elements, the primal abyss; the high value placed on musicality in poetry – poetry’s origins are in song; poetry – song and dance.
Mandelstam didn’t just recite poems, he sang them.
Creative universe
Dante and Mahler
dialogue – the conversation running through The Comedy; the experimental dance at the heart of The Comedy.
Poetry as physics, painting, and music
Dante as conductor the master of dialogic transformation - the most powerful chemical conductor of the poetic composition; Dante’s poetry as physics – space exists as a receptacle for amplitudes; Dante’s dance – Paradiso as a kinetic ballet; Dante’s puts writing on a par with painting and music; recovering Dante, unfreezing Dante – Dante as conductor of music.
Simile as articulated impulse; Dante as the creation of impulses rather than forms.
Dante’s music – the transformations of power flow.
The centrality of the heart – poetry as a sensuous and spiritual experience; sensuous connection to the world; mythology of poetic creation – increased perception; seeing the most tragic occurrences in the light of beauty; the hellish burden of the poetic gift.
poetry can be fatal - the fate of Osip Mandelstam;
Mandelstam’s last poem, This Constant Wish
CLIMATE ACCORD
Fire and ice (Robert Frost) – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity;
The infernal agency of human beings within alienative social relations;
Disaster is to be without a star;
the cry of the Earth as the cry of the poor.
Cleaving to the Eternal Love and staying green and real – the creation requires difference and love as well as universality and justice
Let the music play
I just wanna dance the night away ...
8 APPENDIX– textual evidence of Dante’s internal music References to Music Musical instruments Musical terms Hymns and psalms
Numerology Music and poetry Dante websites