“Love Makes the World Go Round.”
Today is the 700th anniversary of the death of the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri (the night of 13th-14th of September 1321). I should have had my book ready for publication for this date, but 'events' stole the time from me. It will be ready shortly, and done properly to be made well worthy of publication.
I’ve been reading Dante closely for the past decade or more. I have read many books over the years. Thousands frankly. I soon find the end of most of them, extracting what is worthy from them and moving on. I have never come close to reaching the end of Dante. Dante is the endless poet, the poet for all seasons. At one point he refers to God as the “Everlasting gardener,” the “leaves enleaving all” in the eternal garden (Par 26: 64-66). Dante is the poet of that God. His lines are packed with meaning, expanding exponentially as soon as you make the attempt to unfold them, exposing worlds within worlds. He contains too much to be summarised. Only a poet could do that, and then only a poet of genius. Dante had already written many original works before he wrote "The Comedy." He possessed a vast knowledge but, more than that, a vision and a concern to convey all that he knew. His medium was poetry. "The Comedy" is a work of genius, dialogic and not didactic.
Why should you read Dante?
Because all human life, both the good and the bad, is in there. Because he evades the cul-de-sacs of seductive visions of "beyond good and evil." (we all think of ourselves as being with the angels - think again). Because he is a tough guy with a beautiful soul. Dante doesn't shirk the hard questions and doesn’t fudge the often harder answers. Much that he says has me drawing breath, knowing how hard a sell such things would be in an age when individuals reserve to themselves the right to determine the good as they see fit – no good and evil, merely arbitrary likes and dislikes without reference to objective criteria and transcendent standards of evaluation. It is an age of self-cancellation, with no good reason for anyone to be persuaded by the myriad goods others may choose. Dante inhabits another moral universe. That universe is outdated, say his critics. Earlier this year, one scholar praised Shakespeare as far superior to Dante on account of his relativist morality being “more modern.” And the result of that morality is? Rootless hence fruitless. I take that view apart here: Dante and Shakespeare And in the book I wrote on Dante in 2013, Dante’s Enamoured Mind.
Dante sees the ugliness, the sordidness, and the depravity, the worst that human beings can be. He sees that the soul, which is made quick to love and respond to beauty, is also quick to attach itself to the wrong objects and lazily fall into error through habituation. Because he sees the need for guidance, for the happy habitus in which we can know, learn, acquire, internalize, and exercise the virtues. Because he rescues the beauty in the Creation and returns us to Being.
And about a billion more reasons besides. And if you want to know what that Love refers to and entails – the awesome doctrine that nothing escapes Love – then you will have to read my forthcoming book on Dante, Dante’s Politics of Love. Upcoming publication at Fralerighe, details here. This is the best book I have ever written. And by far and away the most important.
A short outline of my masterpiece Dante: From the Dark Wood to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold
My book on Dante is for those who want to go beyond banalities and generalities and learn more about the moving and the turning. Dante is the man who plunges to the depths and soars to the heights in order to touch the roots of a universe animated by the Greatest Love of all. The terrifying but ultimately inspiring message of Dante’s work is that there is no escaping Love. “Here my exalted vision lost its power. But now my will and my desire, like wheels revolving with an even motion, were turning with the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.” Dante Alighieri, The Comedy, Paradiso 33: 142-145
A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.
I read these lines for the first time in Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars from 1927. (I have an old and treasured copy). I thought them the greatest lines ever written. I still do; they pack a wealth of meaning and significance, for those who are serious in overcoming the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity in a way that avoids diminishing agency, consciousness, will, and creative human praxis in face of an impassive, impersonal, indifferent reality. The whole passage revolves on the verb ‘turning,’ denoting an affective power that moves a physical universe with moral force. We live within a ceaselessly creative participatory universe, one animated by a very particular kind of Love. Here’s the revolution I support. And there’s nothing fuzzy about this Love. It entails a hard but liberating discipline in light of a proper understanding of the real world.
Note that the concordance of diverse elements in oneness ends on the plural of "the stars," not homogeneity. Individuals do not lose their identities as they become part of a greater whole. Dante presents us not with a sterile uniformity and empty universalism but a genuine collectivity premised on the moral agency of each making the all. As Dante explains of the eagle in the heaven of Jupiter, or Justice, whose aquiline form is made up of many souls, whenever the eagle says “I” and “mine” it means “we” and “our.” This image of Paradise as the realisation of community is exemplified in the Heaven of Jupiter, where Dante sees a huge eagle comprising the great multitude of individual souls and hears it speak with a single communal voice:
I saw and also heard the beak speaking,
and the voice sounding both I and mine,
when logically it was we and ours.
Par 19: 10–12
Dante’s journey from the anti-society to the truly human society encourages us to understand how it feels to be deprived of communal relations, to be isolated in the midst of others, to be mired in antagonistic relation to others. Such a fragmented society, the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ as a universal isolation, competition, and antagonism, is not a society at all but an anti-society which perpetuates itself by fostering anti-social attitudes and behaviour in the name of survival in the power game. Against this, Dante’s journey encourages us to socialize and internalize connection so that citizens in fragmented communities could come to work together so as to create and nurture the communal bonds and ties that would enable them to live together in peace and harmony. Society can be a hell or a heaven for its citizens, and determining which depends on the means and methods by which connection, communication, and community comes to be impaired or enhanced. Dante’s poetry as a moral art and political practice is one such method.
I then write on Purgatory as the Mutual Aid society, the place where the souls learn the value and joy of cooperation. In Purgatory, the souls provide moral and social support for one another as they work together toward a common end. They suffer, but they suffer together, and know the pain of purgation is also an education and a healing. They know that in making themselves better, they make their community better too; in helping themselves, they help others.
Note that the word "disaster" means to be without stars; note how Dante returns us to a place where we can once again see the stars, beyond the diabolism of infernal separation; note the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes, sustains, and moves all; note the appetitive quality; note the tempering of the even motion of a world in tune; note the conjoining of physical and moral power, the attunement; note that we are enjoined to be God’s partners in Creation. That was always the plan, before boundaries were transgressed by the misuse of moral agency, the free will which Dante praises as God’s ‘greatest gift’ to us.
I will be defending certain views that the liveliest minds of this age have repudiated. The liveliest minds of Dante’s age and before had also repudiated them. There is some suggestion that Dante himself had been an Epicurean and philosophical materialist in the first stage of his life. I trace the evolution of his thought in relation to such doctrines. It is a journey that I have myself travelled. Long before the great visionary William Blake was writing of “the lost “The Travellers Dream under the Hill,” Dante was taking us on that journey back to Love. It’s a harrowing journey at times. It is a journey of self-examination, challenging us with questions that we may prefer to avoid. Dante lived in an age of moral uncertainty, political violence, collapsing assumptions, and failing institutions, as we do. Dante saw his own personal exile as a general condition, as human beings struggled to feel at home in a world that was becoming alien to them. This estrangement made for agony bit also an ever deeper meditation on the causes of human misery and the conditions of human happiness.
Committed as he was to the welfare not only of his contemporaries but of those “who will deem this time ancient,” Dante gave us a discourse that overarches the centuries, a discourse confirming him in his status as the universal poet, not merely as a cultural icon, but as a fellow traveller on the journey home.
I have written too much in these volumes for me to neatly summarise. So I shall just select one theme, one passage, and wrap it up here. Referring back to William Blake’s ‘Lost Traveller,’ Dante is for those who want to know more about existential crisis. I quote from volume 4: Walking and Talking with Dante: The Endless Love on the Unending Road Such a view expresses two visions of paradise, the lost paradise of our origins and the found paradise of our destination. With a memory of our beginning and a glimpse of our end, life's pilgrim journey is to move from the one to other in a story of Exodus, Exile, and homecoming. The journey was called the Way in the Middle Ages. The human being was seen as homo viator, the itinerant man on a journey, the voyager or traveller. Human beings were conceived as people on a journey, ‘on the way, each travelling in the hope to become homo comprehensor, the one who has arrived at the point where all desires are known and fulfilled. This is Heaven. Dante thus emerges as an existentialist whose metaphysics of hope gives us a prodigious personal insight on ‘man on the way,’ informing and inspiring our own pilgrimages in hope. Such an existential philosophy is concerned not with the technical problems of physical existence; these are merely surface manifestations of problems that lie deeper in the human condition. Dante addresses existential questions directly to this condition, tapping the sources of hope within conditions of despair, recovering the transcendent values up which we depend beyond the lack of stability on the surface. In The Comedy, he is a dramatist of the soul as well as a poet-philosopher, going far beyond the empty platitudes of contemporary moral language to the texture of human experience to reveal the endurance of living truths that are as essential to the health and sustainability of our contemporary life as they were to our ancestors, truths which are always capable of being rediscovered and recovered and made the basis of a viable practice.” ‘la infinita via,’ which is something which is beyond our normal human ken. (Purg 3: 34-39
If I had to put it simply, in one line, I’d remind people that lost in the dark wood, Dante looks up. We get lost when we keep looking down at the things immediately before us, failing to see the truth, the reality, the Love, the source and end of all things that lies beyond. Dante continues to light the way.
Everything depends on that "turning" as reunion, the culmination of a process of restoration and healing. The Inferno is all about separation. Dante emphasizes the processes in which human beings become separated from each other, from themselves, from nature and, ultimately, from God, the key estrangement upon which all other estrangements depend. Central to all of this is the idea of separation as diabolic, as the artificial-infernal destruction of the natural-lawful unity which causes suffering, and may well lead to Hell on Earth.
The diabolic spirit imposes separation on the world and brings conflict, suffering and a seemingly endless pain (actually endless in Hell, a realm of the damned cut off from all hope) since it is the unnatural state of being. This is where the notion of an originary politics enters. Politics is about dissensus and disagreement, the raising of alternate platforms and the exchange of different views and voices in search of common agreement. But it is more. This politics – which was known as High Politics when I studied it at university – or real politics – is enfolded within an originary politics. "The political," then, is more than the politics of the “ins” and the “outs” forever fighting their zero-sum games, aiming to claim the power to govern others in a still divided world. This is politics as an endless fight and conflict, a view familiar to Hobbesian materialists and the vision of the “war of all against all” – one accumulates power or gets accumulated by it. This is a condition of estrangement and division. The endless political fight of the contemporary age is, at base, an infernal anti-politics in contradistinction to an originary politics, a diabolic inversion of a true politics as creative self-actualisation. That genuine politics proceeds within a natural-lawful unity, which Dante openly calls God's divine plan for Justice. When I argue (through Dante) that we should be establishing the conditions (moral, social, spiritual) for doing politics well, as against doing no more than putting a dog in the fight (politics as separation based on incommensurate values), this means bringing politics as practised back in touch with its originary moral force. Achieve this, and we move beyond separation as diabolic and politics as infernal as the spirit of unity brings vitality, peace and harmony. So this Greater Love is the spiritual principle of love and unity which, so long as we align with it, then come back within its fold, is the remedy to separation, bringing healing to the world. The diabolic principle separates people on the social level, separating individuals from their senses of belonging, community, and meaning, having them alienate their lives and pursue desire in a market place. Human beings as social beings then split against each other according to self- and sectional interest, identity, and class, the diabolic spirit impelling the members of society to fight each other rather than realize and celebrate their legitimate difference and uniqueness as one. This is separation as the dissolution of the social unity which human beings, as social beings, require to actualize themselves. Everywhere I look I see divisions, often as attempts to correct divisions (hate this children vs adults, men vs women, but as with class, it takes more than a general appeal to “everyone” and banal celebrations of “love” to overcome division. How to overcome division without inverting it and reinforcing it is one of the trickiest problems in politics).
I have a theme of diabolic inversion going on in the Dante book (not surprisingly, seeing as it is a theme which is central to Dante). The Inferno is a diabolic parody of the Paradiso centred on the estrangement of human beings from God, the Ground of Being. This estrangement generates diabolic forms within the anti-community, where individuals and groups separate themselves – or more precisely are separated by alien forms of mediation – so as to misuse others to private ends.
The result of a self-seeking freedom of each in separation is that all become constrained and determined by external force. Think economic imperatives and crises, think the ‘externalities’ which impinge on all. These crises all denote individuals as powerless before collective forces, in need of a politics of unity, a reunion so as to bring a voluntary self-conscious common force to bear upon involuntary collective impositions.
Where once there was unity and a common human family, the diabolic spirit creeps in, with some coming to see themselves as different to others, better than others, with interests to preserve and advance against others. The common good is lost as individuals in their estrangement come to be obsessed by the diabolic spirit. People separate themselves from others and start to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
When you examine the infernal world, you will soon see the illness, the dis-ease, which comes from the natural-lawful originary politics, broken and divided by those obsessed by the diabolic spirit, separating from others, using politics to enforce their separate interests, and making the society of each and all suffer the infernal consequences. Reunion and healing, being "turned" by the Greater Love. That's the revolution, revolution as attunement.
Shoot! I’ve written another essay. I did promise to keep it short and simple. But like Einstein said .. oh forget Einstein, I’ll just go on and on again if I start. I write on Einstein’s God of Spinoza – I systematically take it apart as only half a God, the easiest and less interesting half. Dante reinstates the God of Love and personal relationships. Lose that, and you will soon be without stars. Simple version – get in tune. Dante makes Love the ultimate political category, lighting the way to truth and goodness and inviting the heart to follow. From cacophony to monophony to polyphony, a restoration and renewal.
I can write forever on Dante, he is the endless poet. But I had better be brief. People like it short. “Love makes the world go round.”
700 years ago this night, Dante Alighieri went home to his eternal reward. Always conscious of his status as a pilgrim in this world who was destined for another. May he enjoy eternal rest with God who is the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
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