Paying Attention To The Sky

"I came to in a gloomy wood..." Gustave Dore

Halfway through the story of my life
I came to in a gloomy wood, because
I’d wandered off the path, away from the light.

It’s hard to put words to what that wood was;
I shudder even now to think of it,
So wild and rough and tortured were its ways;

And death might well be its confederate
In bitterness; yet all the good I owe
To it, and what else I saw there, I’ll relate.
Inferno 1. 1-9; translation Ciaran Carson

For years I have been reading in/around/through Dante. Here is a selection of some of those readings with hopes that spur you towards a book, that like Fr. Romano Guardini’s The Lord, has me on a permanent read.

Appreciating Dante
To appreciate Dante it is not, of course, necessary to believe what he believed, but it is, I think, necessary to understand what he believed, and to realize that it is a belief which a mature mind can take seriously. The widespread disinclination today to take Hell and Heaven seriously results, very largely, from a refusal to take this world seriously. If we are materialists, we look upon man’s life as an event so trifling compared to the cosmic process that our acts and decisions have no importance beyond the little space-time frame in which we find ourselves. If we take what is often vaguely called “a more spiritual attitude to life,” we find that we are postulating some large and lazy cosmic benevolence which ensures that, no matter how we behave, it will all somehow or other come out right in the long run. But here Christianity says “No. What you do and what you are matters, and matters intensely. It matters now and it matters eternally; it matters to you and it matters so much to God that it was for Him literally a matter of life and death.”
Dorothy Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante

The Inferno And Today’s Society
That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognize the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one’s own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and conditioning of people’s minds by mass-hysteria and ‘spell-binding’ of all kinds, venality and string –pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance; these are the all-too-recognizable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations.
Dorothy Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante

On the Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy suggests a love story: a tale of sweethearts beyond the grave, Dante and Beatrice, legendary lovers, divided by death, reunite in a poetic afterlife. In fact it is a truer love story: that of a dispossessed soul learning the meaning of life and finding the grace to love that meaning. Attaining that kind of love depends on developing  “the good of the intellect,” Dante wrote… a tale for those who have dreamed of creating something that seems beyond them.
Dante In Love — Harriet Rubin

George Santayana on Dante’s Exile
What is life but a form of motion and a journey through a foreign world? Locomotion — the privilege of animals — is perhaps the key to intelligence. The roots of vegetables (which Aristotle says are their mouths) attach them fatally to the ground and they are condemned like leeks to suck up whatever sustenance may flow to them at the particular spot where they happen to be stuck. In animals the power of locomotion changes all this pale experience into a life of passion; and it is on passion, although we anemic philosophers are apt to forget it, that intelligence is grasped.
Dante In Love — Harriet Rubin

Dante’s Love Contrasted
Dante helped T.S. Eliot see the connection between the medieval Christian Inferno and modern life. Both the poet and his reader have to plumb the depths of Hell and bear the ordeals of Purgatory to reach the love that frees one of desire. Love becomes the basis of creativity. Love as the habit of genius is Dante’s invention, his miraculous synthesis.
Saint Francis’ love — caritas, charity — is not sufficient to assure one’s move … into paradise…A different kind of love, amor, which is intimate and spiritual will do that. Amor is a divine love that is individual, as in the feeling for a child or a lover for a beloved. In the Inferno Dante will see love as an enslaving passion, desire run amok.. He will find that a person enslaved by love dies, a person liberated by love acts…there comes to mind the words of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s hero “It is as if you had been given back to me after you died.”
Dante In Love — Harriet Rubin

Humanism
Whatever praises Dante the pilgrim, speaking in character may address to Virgil, Dante the poet knew and intended from the beginning that Virgil and his Humanism were inadequate to salvation. The action of the story tells us so. From the very beginning Humanism is presented to us as damned. In its own strength, it can never rise higher than Limbo; in its own wisdom it can only show us Hell. Grace sends it on its errand of salvation; even as far as Purgatory it can come only in company with a soul in grace, and here it does not of itself know the way and is subject to this authority of all the Ministers of Grace. The spiritual signification resides in the action and the development of the story as whole.
Introductory Papers On Dante – Dorothy Sayers

The Active Life And The Church
There is a fundamental error about the Church’s attitude to the Active Life – a persistent assumption that Catholic Christianity, like any Oriental Gnosticism, despises the flesh and enjoins a complete detachment for all secular activities. Such a view is altogether heretical. No religion that centers about a Divine Incarnation can take up such an attitude as that. What the Church enjoins is quite different: namely, that all the good things of this world are to be loved because God loves them, as God loves them, for the love of God, and for no other reason. That is the right ordering of love, about which so much is said in the Purgatorio. A full Active Life, rightly ordered, is therefore in no way incompatible with holiness or even with a rich Contemplative Life. Indeed many of the greatest Contemplatives have been masterly men and women of business – one need only instance St. Augustine of Hippo, St Theresa of Avila, or St Gregory the Great.
Introductory Papers On Dante – Dorothy Sayers

The Ways Corruption Is Reached And The Ways Of Restoration
We find it fairly easy to recognize the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including ones’ own the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people’s minds by mass-hysteria and “spell-binding” of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest means of mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are the all-too-recognizable extinguishing of all civilized relations….For Dante the restoration of society must come from within and not from without: the change of heart must precede the establishment of right institutions…
The evil loves that have to be purged are (a) the pride that seeks domination and cannot bear to see another person, class, or nation enjoying equal or superior privileges (b) the envy that is terrified of any sort of competition, lest another’s gain should be one’s own loss (c) the anger that exacts vindictive reparations and cannot forgive past injuries.
Then there is sloth, which may take the forms either of indifference, delay or despair. Then come the disordered love for things right in themselves but wrong when they are made and end in themselves (a) avarice, which is the love of money, whether in the sense of grudging thrift or conspicuous waste, and the lust for that power which money gives (b) the greed of a high standard of living; and (c) the lussuria which is the exaltation of emotional and personal relationships above all other loyalties, human or divine.
Introductory Papers On Dante – Dorothy Sayers

A Story of Conversion
The story of the Commedia is the story of a conversion, and the stages of the process are those which the accounts of many such experiences in real life have made familiar to us. Peculiar to Dante is the part played by Virgil. The sinner, who has fallen so far that he can no longer hear the call of religion, is reached, through the grace of God, at the rational level. He realizes, one may say, that he is on the point of betraying even the ordinary human decencies; and this salutary shock opens his eyes to his condition and starts him on the road to repentance. This recognition of the cooperation of Nature with Grace is characteristically Catholic…
Heaven like Hell is within the soul – it has to choose which possibility to embrace, and, having chosen Heaven, it must die to sin with Christ and make free its will so that it may become one with the will of Christ within it…if love is rightly ordered…it will keep the Law because it wants to keep it and find its freedom in that service.
Introductory Papers On Dante – Dorothy Sayers

This Inverted World
The descent into hell, whether metaphorical as in the Confessions, or dramatically real as in Dante’s poem, is the first step on the journey to the truth. It has the effect of shattering the inverted values of this life (which is death, according to Christian rhetoric) and transforming death into authentic life. The inversion of values…what seems up is in fact down; what seems transcendence is in fact descent…just as the reversed world of Plato’s myth in the Statesman represented a world of negative values…Augustine alludes to Plato’s myth when he describes his own spiritual world before conversion as a ‘regio dissimilitudinis’ (region of unlikeness)…Augustine turns to the light of the Platonic vision, only to discover he is too weak to endure it. He is beaten back by the light and falls, weeping, to the things of this world…(He asks himself) “why God had given him certain books of Napoleonic philosophy to read before leading him to Scripture.” (He answers) “So that I might know the difference between presumption and confession: between those who saw where they were to go, yet saw not the way, and the way itself, that led not to behold only, but to dwell in the beatific country.”…This is the dramatic purpose of Dante’s prologue scene.
Dante The Poetics of Conversion — John Freccero

The Wounded Will
No reader of Dante’s first canto can fail to remember that after resting his tired body, the pilgrim sets off to his objective “si che ‘l pie fermo sempre era ‘l piu basso”

And as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep to the shore turns to look back on the dangerous waters, so my mind which was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass  that never left anyone alive.

The pie fermo signifies the pilgrim’s will, unable to respond to the promptings of the reason because of the Pauline malady, characteristic of the fallen man whose mind far outstrip the ability of a wounded will to attain the truth. The fallen will limps in its efforts to reach God…Augustine insists upon the inability of the will to complete the journey:

I was troubled in spirit, most vehemently indignant that I entered not into Thy Will
and Covenant, O my God, which all my bones cried out unto me to enter, and praised
it to the skies. And therein we did not enter by ships, or chariots, or feet, nor move not
so far as I had come from the house to that place where we were sitting. For, not to go
only, but to go in thither was nothing else but to will to go, but to will resolutely and
thoroughly; not to turn and toss, this way and that, a maimed and half-divided will,
struggling, with one part sinking as another rose.

Dante The Poetics of Conversion — John Freccero

Descent In Humility
Augustine expressed with the exhortation “Descend so that you may ascend.”  In the spiritual life, one must descend in humility before one an begin the ascent to truth, and in the physical world , according to both Dante and Aristotle, one must travel downward with respect to our hemisphere in order to rise. …
The pilgrim in the prologue scene is a man left to himself, unable to order his appetites to his reason, This spiritual disorder, which Aristotle called “incontinence”, is represented by the pilgrim’s inability to move his feet consecutively, just as Plato represented disorder in the soul by the figure of the limping man. Unfortunately for man in his fallen state, the soul’s powers are not equal to the task  of moving toward God for  the intellect is stronger in knowing than is the will in loving, or to state the matter in another way, the affections bind the intellect…
The Christian does not begin at zero point on his journey, but rather from the world of generation and corruption, a topsy-turvy world of inflated pride where directions and values are both inverted. Although the fall from grace left the natural light intact, it involved the will in a conversion to lower things, and the consequent distortion can be cured only by a descent in humility and an ascent to grace. Before the soul can make progress, the twisted course of the will must first be unwound. A passage attributed to St. Augustine expresses the situation in much the same terms:

The love of earthly things extinguished in me the delectation of the heavenly: the having of vice emptied in me the sense of the true gifts. From those gifts am I removed, in thee evils am I occupied; secluded from them included in these; from those am I unwound, in these wound up. Here is that prison and here are those chains, here is weight and darkness.

Dante The Poetics of Conversion — John Freccero

The Limits of Knowledge: Ulysses And Dante
Dante begins to worry about the limits and excesses of art and the artful mind. Ulysses believes that the distance between truth and lies can be bridged by knowledge. He convinces his companions to make this voyage by seducing them with words. And of course, he convinces himself. It is a kind of thievery, secret and furtive. But far from being the master of his art, Ulysses is possessed by it. Knowledge is not the way to the mind of God, as Adam’s dismissal from Eden proved. Knowledge is not Paradise. It is not perfection. It is not bliss…
Ulysses journey was circular. The hero returned home, to Greece and to the afterlife, the same person as when he left. Dante’s is a journey of change. He wants to be free of what imprisoned him, the world of relative truths, cycles of loves, not love. For him the journey is the poem: the ultimate objective of the pilgrim is to become the poet and gain poetic knowledge. Purely philosophical excursion do not please another…Com’ altrui piacque (As Pleased Another — the last line in Inferno when Ulysses describes his death at sea within sight of  Mount Purgatory)
Dante In Love — Harriet Rubin

The Nature of Souls in Paradise
The ambition for everything other than love is silenced in Paradise, there is no desire. Each soul is perfectly happy according to his potential to know happiness there is no envy, no striving. What makes these souls different from the damned in Hell is not that they have not sinned but that they have found repentance, love, and grace. The spirit, Foulquet of Marseille, appears as “joy”. He doesn’t merely greet Dante at a distance, as the souls in Hell and Purgatory have done. Folquet can enter Dante as a joy enters a person. He tells Dante that since his soul in Paradise is one with God, it shares his omniscience. Folquet here knows exactly what is on Dante’s mind:

Here all our thoughts are fixed upon the love
That beautifies creation, and here we learn
How the world below is moved by world above.

Dante In Love — Harriet Rubin