Dante’s Revolution of 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
I first read these lines in Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars from 1927. I have an old and treasured copy. I was myself ‘turned’ by these words. I thought them the greatest lines ever written, and still do. They contain a wealth of meaning. 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. I was turned by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. Here’s the revolution I support.
It’s all on the turning and the moving, the affective as well as the cognitive quality. If you don’t have the inner motive force allied to the motive force of the ‘real world,’ then you have nothing, only a desperation that forces recourse to surrogates and short-cuts that short-circuit the process to deliver the opposite to intentions. A hell frozen in immobility and repetition, in other words.
This talk of Love can seem soft and wishy-washy. I show in my Dante book that it is the very opposite. Getting in tune – harmony as attunement – is all on that "turning" as reunion, the culmination of a process of healing and restoration. Tuning and turning go hand in hand.
Note that the concordance of diverse elements in oneness ends on the plural of "the stars," not homogeneity; note that the word "disaster" means to be without stars and 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.
Dante is all about unity and diversity. His oneness is not some monophone homogeneity and uniformity, but a polyphony. Dante offers the union of unity and diversity as against the twin estrangements of uniformity and division.
The Inferno is all about separation, disconnection, and excommunication - estrangement. Dante takes us through the psycho-social processes and moral processes through which human beings become separated from one another, from themselves, and from God and Nature, the key estrangement upon which all others 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 (which is actually endless in Hell, a realm of the damned cut off from all hope, the realm of anti-music) since it is the unnatural state of being. Here is an originary politics. "The political," then, is more than the politics of the “ins” and the “outs,” those seeking to take turns at governing others in a divided world (or never getting a chance to govern at all). Politics as fight, then, in a condition of endless estrangement and division. An infernal anti-politics is a diabolic inversion of a true politics as creative self-actualisation that proceeds within a natural-lawful unity, which Dante openly calls God's divine plan for Justice. Now I am going to say that that is the originary politics we need to root ourselves in. When I argue that we should be establishing the conditions (moral, social, spiritual) for doing politics well, as against merely having the biggest and loudest 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. Then we move beyond separation as diabolic and politics as infernal as the spirit of unity brings vitality, peace and harmony. So this Highest 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. But it takes more than a general appeal to “everyone” to overcome division. How to overcome division without simply inverting it and thereby reinforcing it is one of the trickiest problems in politics.
I have a theme of diabolic inversion and perversion going on in the Dante book. The Inferno is a diabolic parody of the Paradiso centred on the estrangement of human beings from God, the Ground of Being (the ground of originary politics?). 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. We start with the lesser sins and then, hardening through habit, become encased in the isolation of the frozen pit of Hell.
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. Dante has excellent passages on what he calls “cupidity” and the need for an authoritative politics of long-range common good that enables human beings to look further than the immediate desire which chains them to empirical necessity. All of it is about overcoming the diabolism of separation, the state in which people live in a permanent condition of hunger as thwarted legitimate desire, controlled from above and without by others, who are themselves controlled by the external imperatives imposed in an alienated system of power and politics. From first to last I will continue to resist what I called (in academic research days) “the theoretico-elitist” model in politics (I was writing for academics, who love such terms). It basically refers to a knowledge elite who claim epistemological privilege, a knowledge of a truth unknown and unknowable to others, a truth delivered passively from the realm of theoretical reason (knowledge of the world) to practical reason (politics and ethics). That division reinforces separation. I affirm human beings as knowledgeable moral agents capable of learning by praxis and experience. Dante emphasises the common moral reason which is the patrimony of each and all, describing free will – and the rational and moral agency on the part of individuals which comes with it – as God’s ‘greatest gift.’
I argue against the elect, the chosen, and the vanguard in politics with their diabolic smart intellects devising all manner of psycho-pseudo-religious tools to keep the control by unarguable authority, exploiting people whilst ruling by unwarranted authoritative force. That’s the entrenchment and extension of an infernal anti-politics. When you examine the infernal world, you will soon see the illness, the dis-at-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. It is a restoration which proceeds through all the ledges of the Purgatorio.
It will be good to get this Dante book in print. It is the culmination of a life’s work on ‘rational freedom.’ I’ve got plenty wrong along the way. I’ve got this right.
It is my Sisteen Chapel.
When will you make an end?
When I am finished!
[For those who remember the film “The Agony and the Ecstasy.” I actually think, like the ceaselessly creative and participatory universe it adumbrates (in depth and detail!), it is an unfinishable book]
"Into the yellow of the eternal Rose that slopes and stretches and diffuses fragrance of praise unto the Sun of endless spring." - Dante, Paradiso 30: 124-126
The soul's journey - from the Dark Wood to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold.
The endless Love on the 'unending road' (‘la infinita via’ Purg 3: 34-39).
“Eternity”, said Boethius, “is the perfect and simultaneous possession of unending life”—unending, not in the sense of endless prolonging, but in the sense that a sphere in three-dimensional space has neither end nor beginning—and the entering into this eternity is beatitude.
If Dante's journey is ours, then so too is his refuge, that dream of rational freedom in which Dante outreads his readers, spellbinding by words, conjuring the meanings between the lines and beyond them. I should know, I have tried mapping the man and his vision by words. It can't be done. There is an anarchic excess at work, something core, something beyond enclosure by reason and language. Dante told us all along that ultimate reality was beyond words. Hence my interest in the musical model at the heart of Dante's work - and the universe.
That FB post concerning my ever-forthcoming book is from two years ago. I should have finished my Dante book by now, but have been visited by a succession of problems, dramas, and the odd calamity, (both threatened and actual), since December 2016. It has been a life-changing and even life-threatening few years, and it is a minor miracle that I have something almost readable and publishable in front of me. Bereavement, life-threatening health problems, diagnoses of underlying conditions, ambulance rides, loss of job and income– Dante has been my unfailing guide throughout. It’s something of a miracle I’m still up and running. And it will be a major miracle to cut the one million words down to size and get a volume into print. But I do have the makings of a very good book. Good work has been done on the writing and editing. The million words have been divided into four volumes, with one volume, Dante’s Politics of Love, now looking very good indeed.
Something of the rationale is given in the post below (once you read below the detailed lists of headings and sub-headings in each of the volumes)
I shall end with more essays on the issues raised by my Dante book:
And if you think that’s a lot of reading …. it’s also an awful lot of writing.
Xxxx
I have been known to be utterly irked beyond even my immense patience and very even temper … (!) by people who want a "strategy" to resolve the ills besetting the world. I have just three words for them: "Get in tune."
Reunion and healing, being "turned" by the Greater Love. That's the revolution, revolution as attunement. This is "it." I have been known to be utterly irked beyond even my immense patience and even temper … (!) by people who want a "strategy" to resolve the ills besetting the world. I have just three words for them: "Get in tune." (I have other phrases too, which have the advantage of being more economical with the words). Here it is. And to those who say we don't have time, we have all the time in the world when we learn to live in the eternal now. I know how to address an existential crisis, because I know how deep existence goes.