Frank
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As we make our way through winter, some of us in lockdown, there is an excellent opportunity for readers to discover this great author for themselves, and indeed to venture into the Italian language as well, for many English editions of Dante – unlike those of most other authors – include the original text in parallel to the translation. If you don’t have a copy at home, Dante is of course available online, including Mark Musa’s version and various parallel texts. And I highly recommend searching “Roberto Benigni Canto 1 Inferno” on YouTube for a wonderful performance in the original Italian (with English subtitles available).
Dante’s vision of this world is completely different from the scenes of hell painted on the walls of contemporary churches, in which the lustful are hung up by their genitals on butchers’ hooks, sodomites are roasted on spits and the avaricious have molten gold poured down their throats.
It is far more intellectually sophisticated and morally coherent, as well as complex in the way that it can, for example, evoke our sympathy for individuals whom we nonetheless recognise as inevitably condemned for their actions.
Dante’s world rests on the infrastructure of the scholastic philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who in turn relied on Aristotle as his foundation. When Aristotle asked how God or the prime mover actually moves the cosmos, he replied with stunning concision: “he moves it as being loved” (Metaphysics, 1072 beta); in other words God does not cause things to happen by prodding or pushing, but by being the object, centre and end of all desire. Everything in the universe is drawn to the divine essence and seeks its proper place in the cosmos structured by divine love.
Thus sin is essentially a perverse refusal to align ourselves with the order of the world. If we take the traditional seven deadly sins, lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride, we can see that the first three are comparatively less serious because they represent excessive love of things which it is proper to love in a moderate way. Indeed sloth or accidie, which is a sullen refusal to enjoy the world, is a more grievous sin than the overindulgence of lust or gluttony. The last three are worse again because they represent the perversion of love into hate.
Dante’s hell includes a special section which is free from suffering and is reserved for the virtuous pagans and the patriarchs of the Old Testament; this is where Virgil usually spends his time with the other great poets and sages of antiquity. Particularly interesting is the swarm of dead souls blowing around in the wind that they encounter just inside the gates of hell: these are the souls of those who were neither good nor bad, who took no responsibility in their lives, and who are now refused passage across into the underworld. Their number is so great that Dante is astonished: as Eliot translates the line in The Waste Land: “so many, I had not thought death had undone so many”. And these are also the prototypes of Eliot’s “hollow men” a few years later.
As to where we belong in the afterlife, Dante does not need devils with pitchforks to drag us to our punishments: for when we die, we lose our capacity for self-deception and we understand perfectly clearly how good or bad we are.
At the same time we lose the free will that we enjoyed in life and we find ourselves, as it were, connected directly to the universal will of God: so as well as knowing exactly what our place is in the afterlife, we cannot but will to be in that place. It is no longer possible to want anything other than what is.
The second section of the great work is Purgatory, a place where those whose sins were not irredeemable can be cleansed of their traces and prepared for eventual admission into Heaven. Dante imagines this as an island in the South Seas, at the antipodes of Jerusalem. It is guarded by Cato the Elder and is conical in shape, with a path winding up it in a spiral. At each level, souls are purged of their sins, starting with the least serious, and at the top they reach the level of the earthly paradise or Garden of Eden.
In Heaven itself there are many levels of blessedness, ultimately depending on the spiritual development attained in this life, but once again each soul is naturally in the place in which it belongs and cannot conceive or wish for the higher levels of happiness that others may experience. This book was no doubt the hardest to write, for it is obviously more difficult to evoke successive degrees of blessedness than to dwell on the sufferings and pathos of the wicked. And for this reason the majority of those who have attempted to read Dante have probably only finished the Inferno, or even part of that book.
In reality, Paradiso contains some of the very greatest passages of literature ever composed, especially in the final canti, where Dante approaches the highest levels of Heaven. Here he glimpses the world as it appears from God’s point of view, the opposite of our anthropocentric one. There is an extraordinary passage in which he speaks of seeing things that exceed the power of understanding of the human mind and of which therefore he cannot give a clear account. But in one beautiful metaphor – the great medieval image of the book – he imagines the disparate multiplicity of the world, like scattered pages in our ordinary experience, legato con amore in un volume – bound together by love into a single volume. Christopher Allen
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