I would like to offer some thoughts on my forthcoming Dante book, in this the year of the 700th anniversary of his death.
I shall provide links to the outline of my book at the bottom.
The Dantista are happy with my prospective new book on Dante. I'm getting a good response on Twitter, where I have a small audience of the s/elect. It's still obvious to me that most people are entirely 'unmusical.' They need to be persuaded. But it's reassuring to know there are still more than a few receptive minds out there. One kindly soul declared himself "Mind. Blown." I aim to blow minds with this book and not bore them with heavy scholarship and dense argumentation.
As I did some heavy thinking on the shape and direction of this Dante book and its tone and temper, I came across this quote in one of my many Dante books, a book from 1934:
“Most students of Dante fall into three classes: first, teachers of literature trying to explain what the poet meant and why he said it as he did, and for what reasons that way of saying it is obscure or beautiful; second, minute investigators seeking to know the why and wherefore of every happening, the complete and exact itinerary of his wanderings, and what he did on that day or in that year; third, enigmatographers, erudite or fanciful, who wish above all to display their own learning and skill in revealing the mysteries buried in the poet's work.”
I’ve done a lot of the first and a bit of the second. As to third, I am not keen on hidden codes and keys. I think truth is universally intelligible and accessible. But there are long sections on numbers and the virtues of numbers. I'm not comfortable with the lengthy treatment. I think Dante's psychic and emotional genius transcends such things. (Or is woven into such a fabric).
The author carries on.
“These methods, however, are inadequate for the understanding of Dante in his loftiness and in his profundity; for the comprehension of Dante as a man, a poet, a prophet, of Dante alive and entire. We little men must approach as near as is possible for us to the sum of his greatness; we must possess a spirit which will at least reflect something of Dante's spirit and vibrate in sympathy. It is precisely this which is almost always lacking in the professional Dantists, Danto legists, and Dantomaniacs.”
“They are anaemic creatures confronting a sanguine man; ants around a lion. They can go scouting through its mane, and count the hairs on its tail, but they cannot see the gigantic creature entire in its fearful majesty. And woe to them if the lion should suddenly roar!
These Dantists never warm up, or they get heated unseasonably. Dante is flame and fire; they remain lukewarm or frozen, as if they were in contact with an ageless ruin. He is all life, and they are half-dead. He is light, they are darkness. He is powerful, they are weak and flaccid. He burns with moral and messianic faith; they are usually men who have never known, even from a distance, the torment of the divine. But to borrow Dante's words, Tastidium etenim est in rebus manifestissimis probationes adducer."
[Oh how clever, to translate Dante into Latin, when he specifically avoided Latin in order to be read by the common man and woman. But I do agree. Dante is a downright religious radical, which he adds to his poetry and his previous devotion to Lady Philosophy. He is indeed evangelical for truth, the whole truth. And that notion of the torment of the divine sets the whole thing aflame. It takes more than bloodless, passionless scholarship to get to the heart of Dante.
“Thus Dante has remained, for the most part, the choice food of worthy teachers, or the pastime of ambitious amateurs. Only a few ever draw near to him through a certain similarity of temperament and with the purpose, or at least with the desire, of making themselves like to him in order to understand him better. For this they would need to be not only diligent and enthusiastic scholars, but true poets or true philosophers.
Dante Vivo by Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) (Translated From The Italian By Eleanor Hammond Broadus & Anna Benedetti 1 Jan. 1934
I have expressed admiration for the Dante scholars very many times. I have drawn extensively from their indefatigable researches and meticulously detailed studies. I continue to salute them and will continue to read them. Dante, of course, is the master of precision and concision, a poet of symmetry, law, and order. But Dante’s temperament is radical, subversive, and activist. Rarely in the works of the scholars and academics do we see the Dante envisioned by the great Russian poet and devoted Dantista Osip Mandelstam, who wrote:
'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 them have something resembling Dante's Commedia.'
Dante wrote to communicate a truth and he wanted people to act upon that truth. There are stories of Florentine workmen chanting bits of the poem, albeit badly. Dante wrote in the 'vulgar tongue' precisely so that his poetry - and importantly its message - would be read by all, 'especially ladies.' He liked that women would gather on street corners seizing upon the latest news from the man who was reporting back from Hell. Dante is the universal poet. He stated explicitly that he wrote not for the learned and the wealthy, those who have striven only for money and public prestige and who have turned literature into a harlot in search of fame and fortune; he writes in the vernacular because he doesn't wish to serve only learned Italians and foreigners who know Latin, but the unlearned who are capable of noble aspirations and thirst for lofty instruction. Dante sought to incite action and change, in the self and in wider society. He did, actually, make his practical purposes clear, and expressed himself explicitly on this on his letters of explanation, as well as in his published work.
Here for the first time an appeal was made to the public which was to be the mainstay of the new European culture; from then on the basic works to which European cultural life owed its development were written in the various vernacular languages, for the public that Dante had in mind; they draw the vitality of their expression from the writer's native tongue, whatever it may be, but they all have one thing in common, the conception of a volgare illustre, or a noble vernacular: a literary idiom which maintains a constant give and take with the language of everyday usage and so makes the living element in thought and tradition, the part that is really worth knowing, available to all who are eager to receive it. That common conception, which started with Dante, is a unity in diversity, the true modern European ... common tongue. Though it seems hardly possible to define the spirit of the "noble vernacular," perhaps we may give a general idea by saying that the new idiom embodies a striving for knowledge as a way to mastery of the world, for knowledge as a universally human act and destiny.
Auerbach Dante Poet of the Secular World 2001: 76-77
And I do rather like this invitation to be a true poet and/or a true philosopher, not an archivist or librarian or archaeologist of dead letters. It is an invitation to use one’s own free will, one’s own creative powers, to discern and determine one’s own way home.
I think that we should engage the poem as companions of Dante on his pilgrim journey, rather than as an aesthetic object to be analysed and dissected. Dante issues an open invitation to us to participate on his journey too, as our own journey, with us being no more prepared than Dante was when he awoke to find himself in the Dark Wood.
I think I do grasp something of Dante’s spirit. It is very noticeable to me that Dante is a political being to the core, taking sides and intervening in public life (he takes politics into the afterlife), but also seeking to locate political division and engagement within a greater, unifying, ethic; it is also very noticeable to me that Dante is a city man, a man who affirms civic involvement for the public good. He recovers the ancient and original sense of politics as a creative human self-actualisation within a public life conceived as an ideal human habitat. It is also noticeable that the Inferno is all about estrangement – individuals from each and hence from society and their own social nature (and hence from their own selves) as well as from God; the Purgatory is all about reconnection. It is also very noticeable that Dante puts a heavy emphasis on both acquiring the moral and intellectual virtues and exercising them in an appropriate social habitus. In other words, he emphasises free will and the cultivation of the moral and intellectual capacities to ensure right choices but also insists on the creation of an appropriate social and public life to enable the cultivation of the virtues and their exercise. He combines the personal and the communal. Dante also agrees with Thomas Aquinas’ observation that grace perfects nature rather than cancels it. In arguing this, Aquinas repudiated St Augustine, for whom human effort could yield nothing. For Augustine, it was the grace of God alone that brought salvation. He considered the emphasis on human effort and free will to be an invitation to human pride. Dante followed Aquinas here, and argued for a 'cooperating grace.'
A slightly heretical thought occurs to me here, in analysing the heavy emphasis on learning, philosophy, the cultivation of the virtues, civics, politics, public participation, and the creation of a genuine public community or city state as an ideal human habitat – the more that human beings do together, the more they flourish together, and the less need there is for God’s saving grace. Or for a heavy theological treatise on the need thereof. It seems that all the heavy lifting is all done by human beings. In which case, it makes sense to accent this aspect of Dante, because it entails a humanism that will made the most sense in an age still struggling to deal with Nietzsche's the 'death of God.' That's not true for Dante, of course, and his argument is concerned to bring us to God and beatitude. That's an important argument to make. But people need to be brought to this realisation and not simply evangelised with it (an approach that will not work). Dante learned the need for faith, grace, and revelation after years of heavy immersion in philosophy. I know how he feels, it is the same route that I took with a 'rational freedom' drawn from Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Marx. This is the lesson that this 'godless and prophetless age' (Weber) needs to learn. But people need to learn this for themselves as truth-seekers thirsting and hungering for soul satisfaction.
This was an issue which cropped up again during the Reformation, with Martin Luther arguing for grace alone and Erasmus arguing for human works and the exercise of free will. The Reformation was Augustine's revenge against St Thomas (and Aristotle). We could locate the contemporary clash between Christians and humanists in line of descent from this contest over free will and bondage. Both Dante and Erasmus were Christian humanists, emphasising human effort, valuing learning, and cultivating education, insisting that human beings strive to be good and do good as part of their salvation and the salvation of others.
When I first started writing this work, it was focused on music, the musical model, the inner music in the Comedy and in the universe and how attunement brings us to ultimate reality. This is a way of bringing people to truth, in a way that unproven and unprovable claims about God cannot, no matter how sophisticated the supporting philosophy and theology. I rather like that approach (In my Tolkien book I noted that there is no reference to God and religion in The Lord of the Rings, although Tolkien is a devoutly Catholic man. That book has been read by and moved millions. People respond to the innate moral ecology. I'm looking at sound and vision in Dante, and the dance, a participatory universe in which which it is impossible to separate the dancer and the dance. I find this approach appealing, for the reason that others will find it immediately appealing. I have a feeling that if you hit people with the heavy ethics and theology they will turn away immediately (note that Dante only addresses theological foundations well into the Paradiso, undergoing theological examination only very late in the day, long after he has prepared the psychic and intellectual grounds for response).
I am reminded of the little story about the sun and the wind, who had a bet as to which of them could get a man to remove his coat first. The wind went first and blew and blew, and the more the wind blew, the more the man clutched his coat close to him, determining never to let go. In the end, out of puff, the wind had no option but to give up. The sun took over, and just shone and shone brightly, so much so the man took the invitation to enjoy a nice and warm sunny day and took his coat off voluntarily. I think I prefer the invitation to the dance to instruction and admonition. I think most people would. Art, music, dance - it's all in Dante, the theologians dance, the pageant, the clock of singing souls. And the liquid light and love, life lived in sight of the Sun. Encourage and invite people to come this way. And, of course, Plato/Socrates did identify Beauty as the supreme political category, in lighting the way to truth and inviting the heart to follow. Beauty may well be the last bastion of evangelisation in contemporary culture, one of the few things people are responding to and worshipping any more, whether in the form of art or music. This approach - the musical model as I called it in the first draft - is really worth pursuing, in that Beauty still has a place in people’s lives. If we can present people with Beauty, then we can turn them on to truth and goodness so as to integrate the three great transcendentals. They are all connected (they are all qualities of God, but there's really no need to insist on it - whatever turns and moves inner and outer worlds as one will do it.)
Such is my hunch on this.
Dante presents the wind as a hostile force in a number of ways in The Comedy. The Sun, of course, symbolizes God as the Greatest Love of all, the love that moves all things. The pits of Hell are frozen, the one infernal lake frozen over at the bottom, caused by the icy wind. Dante brings us from the chilliness of Hell to the light and love of the Sun and the stars in Paradiso. But it is noteworthy that The Comedy ends on a plural. denoting a unity that expresses and enhances diversity, as against the imposition of a drab conformist uniformity. To take another famous instance, when the souls who comprise the imperial Eagle cease speaking with their distinctive voices and break into choral song, the transformation from a collective unity to a concord of individuals is likened to the disappearance of the sun and the reappearance of the stars at sunset.
When he who graces all the world with light has sunk so far below our hemisphere that on all sides the day is spent, the sky,
which had been lit before by him alone, immediately shows itself again with many lights reflecting one same source,
Dante, Par: 20: 1-6
For Dante, the stern austerity that puts people on the right path and pulls and keeps them together in Purgatory is not the highest good, but gradually assumes the love and joy that begins in Purgatory’s processes of renewal but which comes to fruition in Paradise.
We are, therefore, dealing with a process. The challenge is one of communicating truth and knowledge in digestible form, hence Dante’s use of the vernacular.
Let's be brutally honest here, we live in a largely post-Christian age. The dominant moral culture is one in which individuals assert the freedom to choose the good as they see fit. It is not, however, a post-religious age. On the contrary, in addition to those who continue to affirm the spiritual dimension of life, there are those who plainly assert a religiosity in relation to decidedly non-religious things, or idols. Many, even most, of those who continue to thirst and hunger for spiritual fulfilment look away when presented with Christianity, feeling that we have been there and not only done that, but are done with it. There is an intellectual, institutional, and historical baggage associated with Christianity that counts against a 700 year-old sacred poet working firmly within the Christian tradition.
So how, then, do you engage modern readers?
In truth, this was the question that Dante put to himself. Whilst Dante in the early 1300’s could take certain things for granted with references to the Christian references of The Comedy, he well knew that people had to be prepared and cultivated in a process that brought them to the truth.
I have no doubt that Dante has plenty to offer. In the first place, he can hardly be considered a religious apologist and rationaliser given the extent to which he was a firm, and often, savage critic of dominant intellectual and institutional forms.
An approach which seeks to distil the essence of Dante and draw people in that way is in keeping with Dante’s own educative intent. Dante sought to give those who hunger for truth and knowledge food in a form that they could digest. He didn’t so much give people truth and knowledge in one indigestible chunk but brought them to it. He drew them in and got them to embark on the journey. Dante selected the essential from his materials and chose a mode of presentation that would draw people in, incite their interest and encourage further exploration. He made the most complex, deepest, and highest truths accessible to a popular audience. In this, he expressed the unity of all knowledge. It was the interrelationship of all the subject disciplines and the body of facts they contained that he found marvellous and wondrous, not merely the facts themselves, and it was this he sought to convey to a wider audience. More than this, he sought to demonstrate the relevance of all branches of knowledge to ethics, and the central importance of ethics to the everyday practical life of ‘ordinary’ men and women. By this approach, he sought to convince people of the urgent need to reform both themselves and their society and its institutions and practices if they were to live a happy life in conformity with the facts about human nature and the place of human beings in the universal scheme of things.
Dante was thus concerned to design the ideal medium through which to bring the 'liberating truth' to the greatest audience in the most effective and enduring way.
The place and prominence of the emotions in Dante is significant in this respect. Stupore, Dante makes clear, is not a virtue but a state of feeling which is praiseworthy only in the young, fading in the development of a noble heart. The presence of this state of feeling makes perfect sense when expressed by all the souls whom Dante meets on his first day in Purgatory. These souls inhabit the lower slopes of the mountain, short of the processes of purgation. They are at the beginning of the process, in the ‘first age,’ standing on the threshold of their 'new life.' Likewise, Dante the pilgrim is here embarking on the first phase of his ascent to Paradise. He and the souls are thus endowed with the same good qualities that are given to noble souls in the first age of their earthly life, so as to help them 'through the gateway and along the path by which we enter the city of virtue.' (Con. iv, xxiv, 9 and 11). These qualities are obedienza, soavita and vergogna. (Con. Iv). Stupore is one of three elements in vergogna, and receives a heavy emphasis by Dante.
Dante thus understood the need to stimulate truth seeking among human beings, to re-awaken the desire for truth and knowledge among human beings and incite them to embark on the pilgrim journey as truth-seekers; he sought to incite the desire to know among individuals by way of marvel and wonder. Marvel and wonder awaken the desire to look further into the cause of the things which excite interest and find the truth out; they kindle the intellectual appetites of human beings, causing them to seek to know and to understand truth for its own sake.
It is for this reason that marvel could be considered the most positive and valuable emotion that human beings can feel. Dante demonstrates great psychological insight as a leader and an educator in the emphasis he places on marvel and wonder and their kindling. Without marvel and wonder, the love of truth would be remain dormant; without the love of truth, there would be no knowledge. Dante’s wise insight is that knowledge and truth cannot just be passively be given but had to be actively willed by human beings, positively loved by them in being assimilated and lived. A truth and knowledge that is simply delivered to passive recipients would be indigestible and incomprehensible, and would be spurned.
Philosophy, which in origin is the love of wisdom, begins in wonder, even if it doesn’t end there. At first, wonder is provoked by more obvious and immediate problems but gradually spawns enquiries that extend farther afield, provoking further, deeper, questions, demanding bigger answers, up to the origin and end of all things. A person who wonders and marvels becomes aware of his or her own ignorance, and it is this that incites the desire to know and to progress further.
Marvel is the cause of this process, not its effect. The Comedy is the story of a personal journey to knowledge. The road to knowledge begins in the sense of wonder. For that reason, it makes perfect sense to incite the emotions and induce people to bring themselves to truth as truth-seekers. We thus journey from wonder and marvel to truth and knowledge. Wonder and marvel take a number of forms on the first day of Dante’s ascent, and remain of crucial importance in the conception of Dante the pilgrim traveller journeying to his destination.
In emphasising Dante's humanism I seek not to gloss Dante's religious theme but to bring people brought up in a non-religious and even irreligious age to it, but not hitting them on the head with it.
Further thoughts on Dante
My book outlines and rationale:
Dante's Sweet Symphony - the organisation of materials
Dante's Journey - an essay
Dante's Sweet Symphony of Paradise - an earlier essay (skip the table of contents)