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Peter Critchley

From the Dark Forest to the Eternal Rose - Editing Dante


Gustav Dore, Dante and Virgil gazing at heavens.


"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.


I have 3,167 pages 1,019,703 words on Dante. My eyes have turned red in editing, and I have been strongly advised to rest. I spent the last two weeks of editing with one eye closed, causing strain and headaches. I have to rest in any case, without instruction, given that I have reached the point of exhaustion. I now need an editor, someone who, with a table of contents in hand, is able to go through this text and select the best passages.


Here is what I had in mind:


1) Introduction – theoretical and practical reason, freedom as appreciation of necessity (reconciling subjectivity and objectivity); the desire for knowledge and the desire for communion; human beings as truth-seekers and meaning seekers.

2) Why read Dante today? Freeing Dante from his fourteenth century intellectual and institutional determinations.

3) The problem - Disorder : The loss of social and moral connection – moral, social, and civic bonds (trust relations). The infernal world of contemporary society and politics. Dante’s Florence.

4) The solution - Order: Music and Numbers –the well-tempered order –Dante’s music of the spheres.

5) Modes of Persuasion – rhetoric, language, and poetry. Dante’s poetry, the De Vulgari Eloquentia

6) Rational freedom - Politics and ethics – theoretical reason – Dante’s formal works of political philosophy, the Convivio and the Monarchia.

7) Inferno – the city of dismisura

8) Purgatorio – a transitional community of conversion and change

9) Paradiso – the ideal city/truly human society

10) Walking and Talking with Dante – Dante dialogues across time and place


Basically, there is a tripartite structure, with ideals (theoretical reason, first principles, Convivio, Monarchia) and realities (practical reason, The Comedy) mediated by modes of persuasion (rhetoric and poetics, the De Vulgari Eloquentia).


That’s what I aimed at, and missed by some 900,000 words. I can appreciate why some prefer numbers to words. There is an economy to numbers and an inflation to words, an invitation to an escalation beyond the realities we need to cleave to. Reason and reality so easily part company and as a result we end up mired in a sophist world of endless linguistic engineering and manipulation, with truth no more than a function of power, interest, and identity. That’s the very thing Dante is trying to turn us away from.


I have broken the material up into five books:


1) The Sweet Symphony of Paradise - Music and Metaphysics 554 pages 178,916 words;

2) Dante's Politics of Love - Politics and Ethics 689 pages 218,709 words;

3) From the Dark Forest to the Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold - The Comedy 1063 pages 318,122 words

4) Rational Freedom - to be partners in the ceaselessly creative universe 634 pages 228,956 words

5) Walking and Talking with Dante - The Endless Love on the ‘Unending Path - ’Dante Dialogues - 210 71,186 words.


The breakdown of these books into their headings gives some idea of the content:


1) The Sweet Symphony of Paradise - Music and Metaphysics 554 pages 178,916 words;

Contents

Dante and Rational Freedom – Rationale and Overview 1

The Musical Model – The Foundations of Dante’s Rational Freedom 2

*[music and numbers 2

Introduction: the right order of things 4

((Objective reality and objective morality)) 8

Transcendent Standards 22

Music and Numbers 22

The Way of Love – Trinitarian Communion 25

The Threefold Pattern 25

((numbers – Pythagoras)) 38

[truth and beauty 44

The One and the Many 49

((numbers – ratio and proportion)) 53

((numbers – Plato)) 55

((numbers - the Pythagorean tradition)) 57

((numbers – numerology – St Augustine)) 58

((numbers – Boethius)) 61

((numbers – the virtue of numbers)) 63

((numbers – Bonaventure)) 65

((numbers – numerology in Dante)) 68

((numbers – numerological thinking)) 71

((numbers – Dante beyond numerology – innate love)) 75

The Musical Model 95

The Metaphysics of Music 95

((Music measures the relation to God)) 96

The well-tempered harmony 97

((the musical journey)) 98

Philosophical and Religious Perspectives on Music 113

The Origins of Music 126

Music as the Profoundest Expression of Nature 137

Walking with Dante 140

[the music of poetry 140

[the musical origins of language and poetry 141

[the Singing Neanderthals 141

[the singing body 146

The Physiological and Psychological Effects of Music 146

The Spirit of Song 150

[the attunement of mind and body 153

((The musical anthropology)) 154

[music, responses, emotions 156

[music and responsiveness – the failure to hear the music 156

Dante and Music 158

Dante’s love of music)) 158

((The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy)) 162

((The musical structure of the Comedy)) 169

((The structure of the musical transition in the Comedy)) 172

((The centrality of music to the universe)) 178

Dante and the Music of the Spheres 181

The Fathers of the Church 203

Aristotelianism, or the Silent Cosmos 212

The Music of the Spheres and Dante’s Works 214

Harmony and Political Order 236

Platonic Ecology 238

Dante’s Physics and Politics of Harmony 242

Ancient Chinese views of Harmony 249

[music and good connotation - Confucius 253

[Confucius, beautiful music and the harmonious society 253

[attunement as harmony 257

Ethical Definition of Music 258

[deep harmony as open 261

The inner music of the Comedy 269

The inner music of the Comedy – Dante’s Musical Model 269

((The music that is beyond rational comprehension)) 270

[the metaphysical attributes of music - notions of true order, relations and reality 287

[distinction between the natural and the human, and the artificial and the instrumental 288

[the diabolic music of the Inferno 295

The Inferno 308

[a world of disorder and disharmony, chaos and cacophony 317

Purgatory 320

[poetry comes back to life - the renewal of life 321

Purgatorio: Musical Liturgy as Pharmakon 324

Healing Songs: Music as Pharmakon 332

[In exitu Israel de Aegypto 334

Casella’s Song 337

The Siren Song 348

Poetry in Purgatory 354

Purgatory as the place of dreams 356

Hymns in the Valley of the Princes 358

[Te lucis ante is sung as part of a twilight mass 360

[Te Deum laudamus 363

Entrance into Purgatory proper 365

Beatitudes and the Songs of the Earthly Paradise 367

The Earthly Paradise 373

The restoration of Earth to Edenic Golden Age 374

((The mystic procession)) 380

The Paradiso: The Attuning of the Sky 388

The Impenetrable Song 389

[Paradise – Plato creation of the universe 390

[emanation in Paradise 392

[the idea of a heavenly harmony setting a template for harmony on Earth 392

[polyphony as an allegory of harmony on Earth 395

[Paradise as a realm beyond the normal senses 396

Polyphony as Political Harmony 396

Cosmological reality 396

The special love of each in their natural movements 399

Creation 420

The craftsman 429

Imagery of Water, Light, and Bow 447

Unity and diversity 464

Rational and Libertarian Freedom 470

Polyphony in Paradise 472

((Song and dance)) 488

Polyphonic performance 505

The Sphere of Saturn 507

[Dante balances individual speech and a greater harmony 509

The Eighth Sphere (The Fixed Stars: Faith, Hope, and Love) 512

[Gabriel's song to Mary surpasses any earthly melody 513

((Music as liquid light)) 528

The Prime Archer 528

The Primum Mobile : The Ninth Sphere : The Angels) 535

((Music as liquid light)) 551

[Love permeates the multitude of spheres constituting the universe 555

The God of Love 558

[the Love that brings eternal joy 558

Climate Accord 565

((fire and ice – Dante’s Inferno and Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of capitalist modernity)) 566

[attunement with the grammar of harmony – the ordered world 589

((Dante and Climate Accord)) 590

Love Beyond Proof 616

Physics, Facts, and the Greatest Love of All 625

Physics and the Mind of God 625

((Beyond the empire of fact)) 625


2) Dante's Politics of Love - Politics and Ethics 689 pages 218,709 words

Contents

Preface 1

The Interconnection of Ethics, Politics and Justice in Dante 4

Introduction 6

Thoughts on Dante 6

Introduction to Politics and Ethics 16

Dante and Rational Freedom. 23

Dante’s Politics of Love 23

Poetics and Persuasion 26

The Ecology of the Heart 31

Bridging theoretical and practical reason 34

Dante’s Politics of Hope 40

The Politics of Love 41

Human Beings as truth-seekers 43

Free Necessity 50

Love and wholeness 63

The Desire for Communion 63

Quest for community 69

The Way of Love – Trinitarian Communion 82

The way of love is the invitation to hope 82

The Political - Holding justice in the heart 83

City citizen and community 88

Popular art and political intention 93

Modes of Persuasion 107

Rhetoric, Poetics, and Politics 107

Marvel and wonder 107

Wonder and knowledge 117

The Desire for Knowledge – Dante’s philosophy of truth-seeking 117

Knowledge and causation – the search for root causes 124

Philosophical anthropology – the search for man 127

From Poetry to Philosophy 132

Dante as love poet - ordering love to its true object 132

Dante’s influences 133

From Poetry to Philosophy 135

The philosophy of courtly love 136

Boethius’ Lady Philosophy 145

Beatrice and the Vita Nuova 158

Lady Philosophy 167

Politics and the Florentine Background 175

Dante and his City 175

The Florentine Experience - The Urban Example of Florence 175

Dante: the political background 175

The Myth of Community: Political Rhetoric and concepts of the city 178

Civics 178

Political Career and Exile 188

The ideal seen in exile 196

Poetics and Politics 201

The Curial Conception of Poetry 202

De Vulgari Eloquentia 205

Natural Language 207

From Edenic Unity to Babelic Diversity 207

LINGUISTIC CHANGE, BABELIC FRAGMENTATION, AND POLITICAL CONFLICT 213

POETRY AND POLITICS 214

THE POETRY OF RECTITUDE 221

Tre Donne 222

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 227

Politics and Ethics 227

Dante and Rational Freedom 227

[Rational freedom in ancient philosophy 228

[Rousseau 230

[From Hegel to Marx 231

[Habermas and rational freedom 232

Factionalism and Tottering Thrones 241

The Need for Public Authority 247

The Diabolic and the Symbolic 253

The Infernal Politics of Separation and Division 255

Dante, politics and the city 262

The Civic Politics of Imperial Rule 263

The Principles of the State 271

City and Civics 271

Political Philosophy 278

The Public Intent of the Convivio 284

Invitation to a Banquet 287

The Right Path 304

Cosmology 309

Natural and Rational Love 312

The True Definition of Nobility 320

NOBILITY, VIRTUE AND HAPPINESS 320

Injustice and Avarice 332

Dante and the Empire – redemption from within 346

Political Peace 346

The social philosophy of the Political Peace 347

THE ORIGINS OF THE STATE: ARISTOTELIAN ENQUIRY 347

The empire and the church 357

Truth and Freedom 386

Intellect, Will, and Freedom 387

The Human Likeness to God 395

The Radical Uniqueness of the Human Person 400

The Monarchia 404

Justice and Free-Will 419

The Principles and Institutions of the Political Peace 424

Peace and government 424

Citizens of the World Monarchia 439

Universal Empire ruling in peace 448

The divine origins of imperial peace 457

Dante and Maritain on World Government 470

The Church and State as communion and community 480

Covenant and contract 480

Church and state as communion and contract – The restoration of communion and community 483

The Political Letters and Dante’s Religious Radicalism 494


3) The Comedy 1063 pages 318,122 words

Contents

Introduction to The Comedy 1

FROM THEORETICAL TO PRACTICAL REASON 2

Dialectic of Heaven and Earth 2

The religious inspiration of The Comedy 3

The Comedy – Structure and Design 18

Practical Reason 20

Dante as inherently political being 36

From disconnection to reconnection 39

cognitio experimentalis Dei 39

Old moral maps, the same moral geography 41

Happy homecoming 43

The Comedy 45

The Structure and the Story 45

[the architectonics of the poem 47

Communion, Community, and Communication 51

Poetic leadership 51

Sacred Poem educate by power of language 52

Justice 56

Exile and separation 67

The education of desire 69

Political concerns in The Comedy 70

The Critique of the Church in The Comedy 75

Commerce and communication money and language 88

THE INFERNO 102

Introduction to the Inferno 102

ORDER AND STRUCTURE WITHIN HELL 104

The structure of the Inferno 104

In the Enclosure of Hell 109

The moral system 110

The loss of right relations 115

The anarchy of Hell 116

Socio political framework of sin 117

Disordered love 121

The Politics of the Inferno 122

The Dark Wood 125

The Three Beasts 131

Virgil – The Public Guide 135

Beatrice’s concern for a friend 141

Paul and Aeneas – the nature of guidance 144

The structure of Hell 148

The Gates of Hell 150

Discord and Disorder 152

((The Inferno – the world of anti-music)) 156

The neutrals 156

The Great Refusal 162

Boniface and the Great Refusal 163

Limbo 165

Dante and Averroes 174

[the philosophers in Limbo 176

The Taxonomy of Moral Order – Virtues and Vices 184

Dante the Moral Taxonomist 185

Punishment and Penalty 186

Lust 190

The incontinent 190

Francesca and Paolo 191

Gluttony and greed 199

Gluttony 202

Greed 205

The Love of Money 205

The City of Dis 206

Dis and Inorganic Wealth 211

The Seventh Circle – Violence 214

Descending into the Depths 214

Descent into aggression towards others 215

Heresy 216

Heresy and factionalism 218

Violence 221

Violence Fraud and Treachery 228

Projection of violence 229

Hell is the place of petrified powers. 230

[alienation and inversion 232

The Old Man of Crete 234

Sodomy 237

Sterility 239

Usury - Violence against possessions 241

The Eight Circle – Fraud 242

Fraud and Geryon 242

Geryon and the rope girdle 242

Fraud and commerce 247

The Malebolge 248

Punishment 249

Hell as penalty 250

Seducers pimps and flatterers 255

Simoniacs 258

False prophets 265

Barrators 269

Hypocrites 272

Theft 274

Counsellors of Fraud 278

Ulysses 278

Guido and evil counsel 285

Eighth Circle, Ninth section of fraud - schism 287

Falsifiers 295

Treachery 296

The Towering Giants of Pride and Power 297

Towers of alien power 298

Treachery 305

Ugolino 305

Lucifer and the closed cold heart of Hell 314

The Frozen Lake 314

THE PURGATORIO 331

Introduction to the Purgatorio 331

The highest mountain 333

The System of Purgation 335

The order of sin 336

Mount Purgatory as Church 336

Mercy forgiveness freedom 337

Confession as truth telling 338

The Structure and Design of Purgatory 341

Clearing the mind and opening the heart 342

The Desire for Communion 342

Penalty 343

Reeducation – The Discipline of the Mountain 344

Learning to become citizens 349

The restoration of community 350

The social components of love 352

Purgatory place and structure – The Moral geography of the Earthly Paradise 354

The highest mountain 355

Poetry and the arts 359

Cato and the Moral Law 370

Entrance into Purgatory proper 373

Cato and Casella 374

Ante-Purgatory 377

POETS AND POLITICIANS IN THE COMMUNITY OF ANTE-PURGATORY 378

Sordello and Farinata 378

Farinata and factionalism 381

Sordello and the unifying force of language 381

Restoration of fellowship 382

The Restoration of Peace and Community 383

The Excommunicate 383

Peter’s Gate and the Seven P’s 392

The Seven Sins 394

The seven p and purgation as a social process 394

The Three Divisions of Purgatory 402

Pride envy wrath social sins of disordered love 403

Pride 403

Pride countered by humility 404

Envy 406

Envy countered by love 406

Mutual support over factionalism 407

Beyond Possession – the covetous and the gluttonous 408

Sloth 415

Virgil on Love and Free Will 417

The need to properly order love 418

Disordered love 420

The shift to spiritual wealth 421

Marco Lombardo and Free Will 437

Commerce and greed in a public context 438

[the need for law and the supreme good 449

Language and Money – Marco Lombardo 452

[The idea of words functioning as guides 454

The Community of Virtue - the habitus of virtuous practice 456

The Insubstantial Nature of the Soul 466

God as measure 467

Avarice 474

Statius earthquake 477

The Gluttonous and the Lustful 477

POETIC ENDEAVOUR AND THE INSPIRATION OF LOVE 479

GUINIZELLI AND ARNAUT 479

The Meeting at the Two Rivers 485

Leah and Rachel at the two rivers 486

Dante’s Crowning in the Earthly Paradise 488

Matelda 494

The Earthly Paradise 495

The Mystical Pageant 498

The departure of Virgil 507

Justice 523

Mystical Procession - church and state relation 534

The Two Rivers 538

Transcendence and reality 542

The Paradiso 544

((the challenge of the Paradiso)) 544

Paradise hard to visualize and conceptualize 545

((the impossibilities of Paradise)) 547

Hell and Paradise as opposites 554

Uncharted waters and transgressive poetry 559

Love and justice in the ideal society 565

Transcendent standards - the otherworldly world of the Paradiso. 568

Secular and spiritual life 577

Beatrice in Paradise 581

Cosmological reality 590

The special love of each in their natural movements 593

[sacred poem transformation as transposition and transfiguration 607

Interweaving within the Transcendent 614

[the theological questions of Paradise 614

Formative Principles 629

Polyphony in Paradise 643

Trasumanar 645

Grouping of the souls 664

The Sphere of the Moon 670

Wishing on the Moon 670

Trasumanar beyond words 671

Piccarda 685

[the peace of voluntary submission 687

The Sphere of Mercury 708

Fame and glory for a just cause 708

The fusion of beings through justice 708

Roman Apologetics in the Paradiso 708

Rebutting the charge that Dante is an atheist and Caesar’s man 716

Justinian in Mercury 721

The Sphere of Venus : The Lovers 733

[venus and diversity 733

The fusion of beings through love 734

Charles Martel 737

THE BONDS OF CIVIC FELLOWSHIP 748

The Sphere of the Sun : the thinkers 755

The leaders responsible for the common good in the higher heavens 755

Apostolic poverty 771

Solomon 771

The Sphere of Mars – the fighters 771

The Fighters for Justice in the World 771

Cacciaguida’s Florence 774

The Sphere of Jupiter : the Just Rulers 799

Love Justice – the Foundations of Loving Authority 799

Jupiter loving authority 801

The Sphere of Saturn : the contemplatives 810

The contemplative life 810

The Eternal Rose with the Heart of Gold - fulfilment 816

The Eighth Sphere (The Fixed Stars: Faith, Hope, and Love) 826

The Cult of Mary. Cantos XXIII to XXXIII 832

Theological examination 835

St Peter’s question 836

[Dante sees the universe smile 854

The Trespass of the boundary - Adam 857

St Peter’s denunciation 859

((Music as liquid light)) 869

The Prime Archer 870

[combining intellect and love in the One 872

The Primum Mobile : The Ninth Sphere : The Angels) 876

The Primo Mobile 876

The Departure of Beatrice 894

The Empyrean 895

The Eternal Rose with the Golden Heart 895

Bernard the final guide 895

Mysticism – the final one hundred lines 895

The Vision of the Trinity 895

[The entire universe is contained in all its diversity in God. 895

((the end of the poem – into the light – the failure of geometry)) 895

((conclusion on love as the answer)) 895

Knowledge prior to love 895

What it is that Dante sees 895

Paradise language conveys a vision beyond words 895

Love and Light 895

((the spiritual centre of the universe – the end of Paradise)) 895

Dante’s Heartleap 895

((heartleap - love as the unifying force)) 895

The Ecology of the Heart 895

The Eternal Love of the Living Liquid Light 895

Dante’s Poetic Invention 895

SACRED POEM – THE REAL AND THE RATIONAL 895

The Poetic Creation 895

Poetry as real – the power of Dante’s poetry 895

HAPPY ENDING 895

The Happy Ending Without End 895

COMING HOME TO THE ENDLESS LOVE 895

The Politics of Love 895

The Ideal Polity 895

The cry of justice from the wilderness 895

Rome the ideal city of Paradise 895

The vision of the Rose 895

Empyrean church and state 895

Paradise is conviviality. 895

The Eternal Feminine 895

Homecoming to a Divine Ecology 895


4) Rational Freedom - to be partners in the ceaselessly creative universe 634 pages 228,956 words

Contents

Dante and Transcendent Standards 1

Enlightenment 12

Metaphysics and Politics in Hobbes and Locke 13

Locke 32

The Ontology of Locke’s Natural Law 37

MATERIALISM AND PLATONISM 45

Transcendence and Contingency in Relation to the ‘Real World’ 45

Rousseau 64

Metaphysics and Morality 69

The Platonism of the Savoyard Vicar 69

Free Will 76

The Soul 80

Transcendent standards and eternal ideas 83

Transcendent Truth, Power, and Representation 91

Power, truth, representation 91

((Reason, Culture and Transcendent Truths)) 91

((Culture, Power, and Truth)) 98

The Best Account 116

((Rational Freedom, Right Relationships, alienation and idolatry)) 123

IDOLATRY FETISHISM 123

DANTE AND MARX 136

Contextualizing Marx's Criticism of Commercial Society 139

[Dante’s sins as capitalist imperatives 139

The metaphor of the orchestra conductor 155

DANTE AND RATIONAL FREEDOM 169

Order Unity Diversity 170

The Danteum – Medievalism, the Hierarchical order and Fascism 170

((the Danteum – the freezing of the music)) 200

((frozen music as immobility of the Inferno – Paradise as music, light and love – critique of the Danteum)) 202

Dante’s Heartleap 208

Love Beyond Proof 215

**The Physical and Moral Universe - ‘God,’ for short. 233

((putting fact and value together)) 234

Against naturalism and scientism 236

The Apocalyptic Dream of Rational Freedom 243

((The Danteum – the petrification of Paradise)) 253

((numbers – physicist and Dantista Margaret Wertheim against Platonism)) 255

The Two Concepts of God 273

The Physical and Moral Universe as One 273

[the dissolution of morality into value judgements – the simplicity and unity of God 274

[disenchantment and despiritualization 287

Creator God or Natural Creativity? 300

[the Einsteinian "God" 327

Forbidden Knowledge 357

[Dante the transgressor 357

[the sacred beyond human invention 367

[Dante the transgressor in desire to see the face of God 367

[Bacon and science 376

[apprehending our invented symbols – living as if we knew 376

[philosophical reason undercuts itself 376

((the secret – against reinventing the sacred)) 384

[Nietzsche, enveloping illusion, and disenchanting analysis 388

Transcendent Reason and Pragmatism 405

((fulfilment of the soul’s desire – eccentricity beyond control)) 413

((the illusions of being in control and of being in charge – letting go of neurosis)) 429

((Be still and know)) 456

((the dancer and the dance – getting in tune)) 458

the musical model in politics 458

Unity and Diversity 460

[a world in union and in motion 463

((P.B. Shelley – unity and diversity)) 463

Poetic Invention and Real Fiction 472

The Politics of Love and Justice 476

((functional order – differentiated power)) 479

[the ascending theme of power and government 479

[diverse ranks coming to render sweet harmony 486

((functional order – the just society and love divine)) 488

((unity in diversity – the politics of the common good)) 489

ALIENATION AND RATIONALISATION 509

((Dante and Marx)) 509

FREEDOM RATIONALIZED 556

((Dante and the disenchanted world of Max Weber)) 556

From Corporeal Usury to Spiritual Usury 576

Alienation Rationalisation and Religion 576

The Poet of Popes - Dante’s Catholicism 580

[Dante’s Catholicism invites non-believers to return home 580


5) Dante Dialogues - Walking and Talking on the ‘Unending Path’ 227 pages 75,000 words

Contents

The centennial of Dante’s death approaches in 2021. 2

Exile and homecoming - Quest for Meaning, Calling back the Soul 4

Quest for soul and meaning 7

Introduction – Why Read Dante Today? 18

Why Dante? Which Dante? 18

((the human comedy – existential crisis)) 39

Dante’s invention)) 58

Dante’s devotion to impossibility)) 63

Responses and Reactions 67

*Dante’s Poetics of Love as an Ethics of Friendship 74

((the impossibilities of the Paradiso – Wilde vs Beckett)) 84

Dante’s Fortuna: An Overview of Canon Formation and National Contexts 96

Oscar Wilde in Paradise 98

Dante Between the Wars 120

Osip Mandelstam’s conversation with Dante 126

The Distinction Between Authority and Authoritarianism 157

Word Return to Music 165

The Creative Universe 178

[Dante’s influence on TV – arsy versy world 191

Word, Return to Music 192

Mikhail Bakhtin 192

[Bakhtin and the dialogical nature of artistic creation – language an expression of social identity 192

Dante Now 214


I need an editor who is able to cope with all of that and has the ability to select the most relevant, the most readable, passages that fit a clear and coherent plan. I can promise that it will be an education.


There is no capturing Dante. It is the easiest thing in the world to trace Dante’s influences - Neoplatonism, Aristotle, Aquinas, Boethius, Cicero etc. But it’s not where you take things from that counts, it’s where you take them to, and why. One of the many fallacies of the age is the fallacy of origins. People think that if they can trace an idea or an institution or a tradition to an earlier source they have thereby proven its artificiality and therefore its error. The problem with that game is that if you look hard enough and long enough, you will find it’s all ‘made up,’ everything is a social and cultural construction, including your own beliefs and opinions, which you may be inclined to be true in the sense of corresponding to reality. This is child’s play. Dante does more than this. Dante is creative with his sources: he changes things, adds, blends. He does so because he proceeds from the understanding that source and end are one. The result is a creative movement that comes to rest, stillness, and silence. It takes a poet to understand the energy of Dante's poetic dynamism. Osip Mandelstam, who wrote:


"Dante is an antimodernist. His contemporaneity is inexhaustible, measureless, and unending. … It is unthinkable to read the cantos of Dante without aiming them in the direction of the present day. They were made for that. They are missiles for capturing the future. They demand the commentary of the futurum."


We, the walking wounded, who are being hammered by these times of mutual indifference to each other’s dreams and visions, gods and goals, which explodes into mutual hatred under stress, are all a part, however small a part, of that future. That's what Dante understood behind the impressive architectonics, the metaphysics, the ethics, the numbers, the music - the centrality of moral agency. Dante sought to restore the power of discernment and the soundness of the intellect. I suspect that Dante was very much concerned to take his place among us. In exile he had lost everything he loved, everything that was familiar. His very identity, his history, was under threat. He wrote passionately to secure his reputation in the present by reminding people of his past achievements as a poet. His Convivio offered prose commentary on his poems, underlining to one and all that he still existed and still mattered. ‘Subsisto.’ He makes the same declaration in The Comedy. He worried that too much truth may offend the readers of his own age. When T.S. Eliot declared that ‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ he wasn’t referring to the bad housing, low-paid jobs, poor prospects, nor even the dull routine of the everyday that is the normal lot of folk, but the altogether more immense, cosmic, reality of the invisible and the intangible. He understood what Dante understood when issuing his warnings at the beginning of the Paradiso that not all will be able to comprehend the truth he was about to put before them. Specifically, Eliot, like Dante, was referring to ‘the heavy burden of the growing soul’ (Animula) and the spiritual illumination that comes with the ‘shaft of sunlight,’ (Four Quartets), a spiritual illumination that described the journey towards God.


Dante’s fears and worries were soon dispelled in his own confrontation with reality. With exile comes objectivity, and for Dante to have compromised his words in the present would have served only to lose him his great public of the future:


I learned that which, if I retell it, must for many have a taste too sharp, too harsh;


yet if I am a timid friend of truth, I fear that I may lose my life among those who will call this present, ancient times.”


The light in which there smiled the treasure I had found within it, first began to dazzle, as would a golden mirror in the sun,


then it replied: “A conscience that is dark— either through its or through another’s shame— indeed will find that what you speak is harsh.


Nevertheless, all falsehood set aside, let all that you have seen be manifest, and let them scratch wherever it may itch.


For if, at the first taste, your words molest, they will, when they have been digested, end as living nourishment.


Paradiso 17: 116-132


And if you want to know what the answer is, Dante is clear that it is Love. And if you think that's a warm and fuzzy concept easily trumped by the hard realities and unwinnable inanities - not to say murderous insanities - of a diabolic politics, then you need the hard course of the one million words above to learn otherwise. It may make your eyes red, though.


Either way, I need an editor Dantista, someone with sufficient madness/enthusiasm to bring the 'living nourishment' to those who thirst and hunger.


Ciaran Carson comments that we rarely, if ever, get a glimpse of the Dante envisioned by the great Russian poet Mandelstam:


"If the halls of the Hermitage were suddenly to go mad, if all the paintings of all the schools and the great masters were suddenly to break loose from their hooks, and merge with one another, intermingle and fill the rooms with a Futurist roar and an agitated frenzy of colour, we would then have something resembling Dante's Commedia."


- Osip Mandelstam


I think I've just written that very thing. Not by design, mind. I aimed at clarity, coherence, symmetry, order, in honour of a poet who valued all of those things as against chaos and cacophony, and instead produced a multi-coloured maelstrom. I shall claim that I was trying to live up to Mandelstam's vision of The Comedy. The text I have is unreadable in present form, but immense all the same. Potent and visionary, it is a beautiful madness. And a mess. Which goes to show why we need poets, and why Dante is peerless, crystalline, and precise.


My advice? Just read Dante. He's the best.

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