More thoughts on Dante. I am working and thinking hard on the book that is in the process of emergence. There is a lot of reading to do, but I shall be finalising this month.
I think we will hear a lot this year on language, poetry, politics, and humanism in Dante - all of which are hugely important.
I want to convey what Dante sees and what Dante hears - the inner music drawing us to harmony, attunement, the movement that ends in rest, accenting the awareness of reality that grows on the pilgrim journey
It is a journey of reconnection, renewal, restoration, rebirth.
Although the individuals that Dante meets in the afterlife are technically disembodied spirits - Dante is the only flesh and blood character in The Comedy - they address the poet as distinct, fully human, individuals. In fact, these shades reveal themselves with a vitality and purity of being only possible because the dross has been purged to leave only the essential character. Exactly two decades ago I submitted my PhD thesis on Marx and the truly human society, the realized society of realized individuals as social beings. It's a worthy ideal. And here is the transcendent source and end. Dante's 'trasumanar' points to the necessary spiritual dimension in the realisation of that ideal.
The poem is shot through with the movement of potentiality becoming actuality, bringing individual souls to vivid life as participant pilgrims who body-forth essential truth in their innermost individuality.
Of these shades/souls, Auerbach writes, "though the concrete data of their lives and the atmosphere of their personalities are drawn from their former existences on earth, they manifest them here with a completeness, a concentration, an actuality, which they seldom achieved during their term on earth and assuredly never revealed to anyone else." What's more, "The passion, which, either from diffidence or from lack of occasion to speak, tends in temporal existence to hide, bursts forth here, all in one piece, as though moved by the awareness that this is its one and only opportunity to express itself."
Dante is the poet of a self-actualisation bounded only by the Will in which we find eternal peace.
"Here from the dead let poetry rise up ..."
Dante, Comedy, Purg 1: 7
https://pcritchley2.wixsite.com/beingandplace/post/thoughts-on-dante
Erich Auerbach described Dante as a poet of the secular world, the first great realist author, and perhaps the greatest of all. In Auerbach's words, Dante was the first to configure "man, not as a remote legendary hero, not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness; and in that he has been followed by all subsequent portrayers of man, regardless of whether they treated a historical or a mythical or a religious subject, for after Dante myth and legend also became history." (Dante: Poet of the Secular World."
I think that that is an important half truth, and the other half of the truth is that Dante is even greater than that. It's that other half that people may struggle most to accept. People tend to focus on the Inferno, because it is comprehensible and realist. My view is that it is the Paradiso that is the true reality, pouring out the truths that people need like rain, resplendent, blinding, something that requires the preparation of vision.
Dante continues to make us see that individual destiny isn't meaningless, but is significant, both tragic but ultimately - and here is the transcendent hope that is all-important - comedic. The livelier minds of the modern age will repudiate this - which is why it stands in need of the whole message - putting two half truths together will never form the whole truth - you take the whole in digestible parts presented as the one process.
Dante is far more than a dreamy mystic or a versifying schoolman. He truly is a "poet of the secular world," of our fallen earthly realm where people laugh and conspire, love and hate, sin and triumph over sin. But he is a mystic with a moral all the same. A man of reason and faith - rational as far as reason will go, which is almost to the end in Dante. Lost and mired in the dark abyss of politics, we struggle to hear and respond to the transcendent call of the Beautiful, the music that brings us to attunement. There's a musical model running through this vision, establishing the psychic, social, and institutional conditions for doing politics well, expressing the insight that the Beautiful is the supreme political category for the way it unites emotion and reason and instantly lights the way for the heart to follow.
There is no stoic indifference to life's vicissitudes here, Dante impels each of us to engage intensely with the issues and conflicts of this world, with a view to a greater reconciliation. All life burns in the pages of Dante, his Comedy is a human comedy, individuals brought to life on the page with an anguished, yearning, keening, heart-piercing reality. Marx understated when he referred to Dante as 'the great Florentine.'
I'll be going with what Dante sees and what Dante hears, something which is accessible to all people:
“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
The musical model that draws all things together in sweet harmony.
Unity and diversity - the poem ends on a plural - the stars. The sheer diversity of the characters and personalities in the Commedia is breath-taking, rivalled only by the whole of Shakespeare laid end to end. Dante's verse is sharp and clear, zeroing-in relentlessly on experience at ever greater levels.
How real do you want it?
Dante deals with the conundrum that the more comprehensive the meaning, the less comprehensible it is. Dante attempt to convey through language a message that transcends language.
From personal experience, a unique, contingent, and ephemeral this-worldliness expands into the universe to become 'an immutable vision of reality in general, earthly particularity held fast in the mirror of a timeless eye.' (Auerbach).
A commentator writes 'it should be evident that Erich Auerbach, despite his sometimes abstract Germanic prose and commanding scholarship, is also writing straight from the heart.'
I rather like that description. I write a lot on the ecology of the human heart in this Dante book, the motivational and transformative force of true poetry.
But there is a moral and philosophical weight to The Comedy, which modern ears might struggle to understand, let alone accept. Dante emphasises the likeness to God. The structure of the poem and the richness of its dramatis personae, which establish its character as a summa vitae humanae, reveal the direct influence of the endlessly surprising St. Thomas Aquinas. As I argued in my book Aquinas, Morality, and Modernity, Aquinas establishes individuality and diversity as a theological tenet. We are worlds away from drab uniformity and sterile homogeneity here. Since the world was made in God's image, it follows that no one species of created things is adequate to reflect the likeness of God in itself, not even the supposedly exalted human species. Aquinas argues that all species are needed.
In terms of The Comedy as a 'human comedy,' every soul possesses its own particular, gradually acquired habitus, "an enduring disposition which enriches and modifies the substance; it is the residuum in man's soul of his soul's history; for every action, every exertion of the will toward its goal leaves behind a trace, and the modification of the soul through its actions is the habitus. In the Thomist psychology diversities of habitus account for the diversity of human characters; it is the habitus which determines how each empirical man will realize his essence. It illumines the relations between the soul and its acts. But the habitus only reveals itself over time. As a result, no matter what one's precise earthly station, each human being must necessarily be a dramatic hero."
I would emphasise that line from Auerbach - the ideal habitus for human flourishing only reveals itself in time and place, "it is the habitus which determines how each empirical man will realize his essence." That view is not a world away from the truly human society pursued by Marx, at least not in the way I have examined Marx over the years, in terms of the commitment to a society which rational freedom and a normative essentialism.
In fine, "reality and superhuman will, order and compelling authority" generate the substance of the Commedias style."
Despite metaphysical assumptions and theological and political commitments that are not shared by the modern age – and in large part are incomprehensible to the modern age – Dante still stands at the summit of art and civilization, raising all who make their way through his ‘sacred poem’ to an ecstatic vision of wisdom and beauty.
“Thus in truth the Comedy is a picture of earthly life. The human world in all its breadth and depth is gathered into the structure of the hereafter and there it stands: complete, unfalsified, yet encompassed in an eternal order; the confusion of earthly affairs is not concealed or attenuated or immaterialized, but preserved in full evidence and grounded in a plan which embraces it and raises it above all contingency. Doctrine and fantasy, history and myth are woven into an almost inextricable skein.... Once one has succeeded in surveying the whole, the hundred cantos, with their radiant terza rima, their perpetual binding and loosing, reveal the dreamlike lightness and remoteness of a perfection that seems to hover over us like a dance of unearthly figures.”