The historian, as Friedrich Schlegel said, is "the prophet looking back-wards." Glimpses of what could be in store for the world, dangers to avoid or opportunities to grasp, may be discerned in The Dark Valley. The story of how the leading industrial nations passed from the Slump to a war in which they were all belligerents is told chronologically. Unlike painters, who can present a vast composition on a single canvas, writers must proceed in linear fashion. But in so doing writers of large histories, especially, risk losing the narrative thread in the warp of simultaneous incident and the weft of related interpretation. But they also enable me to develop the main theme of the book, which concerns the manipulation of perception and the distortion of reality. Propaganda became part of the air people breathed during the 1930s. All the major occurrences of the day were the subject of organised deception which ranged from the big, amplified lie to a delicate economy with the truth. Moreover, many public spectacles were specifically mounted and choreographed with propagandist intent. King George V's Silver Jubilee celebrations and his son's coronation were a democratic riposte to Hitler's barbaric pageants at Nuremberg. Stalin's purge trials dramatised a new kind of tyranny. Mussolini's aerial circuses advertised the virility of Fascism. The unveiling of countless war memori-als in France not only marked the nation's immense sacrifice but stressed its incapacity to face another blood-letting. Hollywood created celluloid myths to banish the Depression and affirm the New Deal. The machina-tions behind the scenes were at least as important as the performances acted out on the stage. Of course, to lie is human and deceit has always been the element in which politicians, more than most people, live—their salamander's fire. "Lord, lord," said Falstaff, "how this world is given to lying!" Similarly the manufacture of illusion has invariably been part of the business of govern-ment. Rulers as remote as Rameses II, Augustus Caesar and Louis XIV have exemplified Montesquieu's dictum that the splendour surrounding monarchs forms part of their might. Yet the Depression years witnessed
the dissemination of falsehood on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Never had science and art so combined to promote earthly powers. Goebbels and others developed novel techniques of thought control. New media such as radio and talking pictures were mobilised to sway the masses. Leaders used aircraft to grab the limelight and they emblazoned their mes-sages on the sky. Dictators imposed their version of the truth by means of dogma and terror. They created new cults and persecuted unbelievers. Russia and Germany, and to a lesser extent Italy and Japan, had their own reality. Facts were moulded like plasticine into the approved shape, whether Communist, Aryan, Fascist or imperial. Totalitarianism won adherents across frontiers, for the failures of capi-talism were palpable during the Depression and the democracies suffered a sharp crisis of confidence. Hearing that Stalin had achieved planned progress and social equality, that Hitler had abolished unemployment and built autobahns, that Mussolini had revived Italy and made the trains run on time, people in Britain, France and the United States were inclined to believe that Utopia was another country. Many converts suppressed their critical faculties in all sincerity and naivete: on the basis of a visit to Moscow in 1939, for example, Sir Charles Trevelyan told the Daily Tele-graph that Russian public opinion was the best informed in the world. Many others thought it a small matter, at such a fraught time, to sacrifice veracity on the altar of ideology. In fact the Great Depression may best be understood as the moral equivalent of war, whose first casualty is truth. Naturally people did not lose the ability to make up their own minds during the 193os. All sorts of disparate creeds flourished in the West, where many were quite untouched by the political fundamentalism of the day. Even Germans under Hitler and Russians under Stalin remained free in their heads. But how free? Mass brainwashing did not work in the dic-tator states, but it had some effect in clouding apprehension. Confusion also reigned in the democracies, where citizens were sceptical about offi-cial information, especially after revelations that atrocity stories accepted as gospel during the Great War had been lies. Moreover, the general cli-mate of opinion militated against certainty. The old Victorian orthodoxies were crumbling under the assaults of subversives from Samuel Butler and Edward Carpenter to H. G. Wells and Lytton Strachey—to say nothing of world-shakers such as Darwin, Freud and Einstein, let alone Heisenberg. Thus many became a prey to half-belief and double-think-1984 began in 1931. This is not to deny that dialectical vacillation and dual consciousness are perennial conditions. As Montaigne argued in his essay on incon-stancy, paradox is integral to personality. "The daemon of Socrates affords a memorable instance," declared Gibbon, "how conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud." Yet never was conviction more fractured or doubt more pervasive than during the 193os. Then, to a greater degree than ever before or since, humanity saw through a glass darkly. It is always hard to unearth what Victor Hugo called "that huge blind mole, the Past," but never more so than from the Kafkaesque burrow dug in the Depression. This work therefore includes a pronounced epistemological dimension. It investigates how, and how far, contemporaries knew what they knew and the extent to which our own view of the time is fogged by their uncer-tainty. It surveys the strategies of delusion and self-delusion, the tech-niques of obfuscation, euphemism and selective amnesia, the mechanisms of willingly suspending disbelief and accepting the evidence of things not seen. Above all it elucidates the way in which political power obscured knowledge and economic catastrophe darkened understanding. This theme is reflected in the metaphor which recurs again and again in one form or another and which gives the book its title. Many people during the 193os remarked that they were passing through a dark valley, the valley of the shadow of death, a vale of tears in which the forces of darkness threatened to overwhelm the angels of light. The imagery was biblical (rather than Freudian) but darkness was no mere image: it literally covered the earth during the Depression. If the lamps went out in 1914, if the blinds came down in 1939, the lights were progres-sively dimmed after 1929. As H. G. Wells observed (in The Shape of Things to Come [1933]), the "polychromatic visual clamour" of Broadway, Pic-cadilly Circus, the Champs-Elysées, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza died away. Opacity "recaptured the nocturnal town. 'Night-life' became stealthy and obscure, with an increasing taint of criminality." The neon brightened later and by 1934 the photographer Man Ray, poet of the dark-room, could speak of an "age of light." The glare was increased by dicta-tors keen to appear in a good light. As that phrase suggests, the central metaphor of this book is a mixed metaphor. Darkness invariably presented itself as light and was occasionally mistaken for it. Light, which Sir Thomas Browne called "the shadow of God," was equally ambiguous. It was often refracted through a prism of incomprehension and at times par-tially or wholly eclipsed. So my purpose is clear, if ambitious. It is to shed new light on a dark, dishonest decade. It is to cast a broad beam of illumi-nation into a gloomy period, a period when the world was struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another, the greatest in its history.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Shakespeare
Among the lesser-noted disposals was a dark oval portrait, twenty-two inches high by eighteen wide, purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the Chandos portrait. The painting had been much retouched and was so blackened with time that a great deal of detail was (and still is) lost. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of about forty who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a gold earring. His expression is confident, serenely rakish. This is not a man, you sense, to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter. Although nothing is known about the origin of the paint-ing or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. Certainly it looks like William Shake-speare—but then really it ought to, since it is one of the three likenesses of Shakespeare from which all other such likenesses are taken. In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery's first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. Many critics at the time thought the subject was too dark-skinned and foreign looking—too Italian or Jewish—to be an English poet, much less a very great one. Some, to quote
the late Samuel Schoenbaum, were disturbed by his "wanton" air and "lubricious" lips. (One suggested, perhaps a touch hope-fully, that he was portrayed in stage makeup, probably in the role of Shylock.) "Well, the painting is from the right period—we can cer-tainly say that much," Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language. "The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the sub-ject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period." I asked how she could tell these things. "Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian," she explained. "An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now—that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventur-ous disposition. Men who could afford to wore a lot of jewelry back then, mostly sewn into their clothes. So the subject here is either fairly discreet, or not hugely wealthy. I would guess prob-ably the latter. On the other hand, we can tell that he was pros-perous—or wished us to think he was prosperous—because he is dressed all in black." She smiled at my look of puzzlement. "It takes a lot of dye to make a fabric really black. Much cheaper to produce cothes that were fawn or beige or some lighter color. So black clothes in the 16th century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.
the late Samuel Schoenbaum, were disturbed by his "wanton" air and "lubricious" lips. (One suggested, perhaps a touch hope-fully, that he was portrayed in stage makeup, probably in the role of Shylock.) "Well, the painting is from the right period—we can cer-tainly say that much," Dr. Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language. "The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the sub-ject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period." I asked how she could tell these things. "Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian," she explained. "An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now—that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventur-ous disposition. Men who could afford to wore a lot of jewelry back then, mostly sewn into their clothes. So the subject here is either fairly discreet, or not hugely wealthy. I would guess prob-ably the latter. On the other hand, we can tell that he was pros-perous—or wished us to think he was prosperous—because he is dressed all in black." She smiled at my look of puzzlement. "It takes a lot of dye to make a fabric really black. Much cheaper to produce cothes that were fawn or beige or some lighter color. So black clothes in the 16th century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.
Sunday, June 07, 2015
Besotted Antony
For the most part the reports of Antony's disorienting, degrading passion for Cleopatra date from the Athenian summer. If in Alexandria he had distracted her from state business, the tables now turned. He attended principally to her. "Many times, while he was seated on his tribunal and dispensing justice to tetrarchs and kings, he would receive love-billets from her in tablets of onyx or crystal, and read them," Plutarch tells us. (Antony was not the first to receive love let-ters on state occasions. Caesar too had received "wanton bits" during Senate sessions. That mistress did not write on onyx tablets, however.) At one juncture Cleopatra happened to ride conspicuously past the courts on the shoulders of her servants as Antony presided over a legal case. A distinguished Roman orator held the floor, or did until Antony caught sight of Cleopatra. He then "sprang up from his tribunal and forsook the trial, and hanging on to Cleopatra's litter escorted her on her way." It was ignoble behavior; a Roman could indulge in as diversified, as lurid, a sexual life as he pleased, but he was meant to be discreet and unsentimental in his affections. Pompey had made himself a laughingstock for his indecent habit of falling in love with his own wife. In the second century a senator was expelled from that assembly for kissing his wife in public, in full view of their daughter. Antony had been reprimanded years earlier for having openly nuzzled his wife. He was said these days to rise during banquets, before his guests to massage Cleopatra's feet according to some compact they had made." (The relationship proceeded by pacts, wagers, and competitions, something Cleopatra brought to the table. Antony was little inclined to formalities.) The gesture was in itself offensive; one had servants for such indulgences. the stories— of what another age might term gallantry or devotion, of what the East deemed proper obeisance, of what were in Rome indecencies and indignities—piled up. Antony fawned over Cleopa tra, which was what eunuchs did. He trailed her litter through th( streets, among her attendants. And this, sniffed the Romans, he apin upon the Egyptian queen the usual abuse of the other woman, when she was not even beautiful! From Octavian's point of view, the Athenian reports were too good to be true, as they may well have been. For all of the mania preparations, for all of the governmental irregularities in Rome despite the gathering sense of inevitability, there was no real cause fo a rupture; Antony and Octavian remained two men in search of a conflict. They found one in 32. Antony evidently felt some degree of attachment to Cleopatra or felt with her invincible: In May, he divorced Octavia. From Athens, he instructed her to leave their corn fortable home. We cannot know how much that gesture was directed at Octavia and how much at her brother. Coming as it did after years of disingenuous reconciliations and flimsy agreements, after a season of slanders, it may only have preempted a salvo from the other dire( tion. Octavia could have elected to end the marriage herself. The divorce itself was simple, an informal procedure for which there was no paperwork. Its ramifications were more complex. As Plutarch remarks on the death of Pompey's wife and Caesar's daughter, the family alliance "which had hitherto veiled rather than restrained the ambition of the two men was now at an end."
Tuesday, June 02, 2015
ATS
THE GUIDING THEME of our book can be stated in a series of questions. First, what understanding of being human has shaped the various epochs in the history of the West? In particu-lar, how did the various accounts of human existence show us who we are in relation to a source of meaning outside of us; in relation, in short, to what we have held sacred in our various ways. Second, how did these accounts of human being, and of the sacred, keep the problem of nihilism at bay? And finally, is there anything in these self-understandings from our history that we can use to combat the nihilism of our secular age? These are the questions that direct a phenomenological, rather than humanist or Hegelian, reading of the history of the West. A phenomenological account of this sort focuses on the way people ex-perienced themselves and the sacred rather than on the rational con-ceptions they had of themselves and their world. It sees in our history not unidirectional change—neither forward nor backward—but a series of different paradigms of cultural practice each of which high-
lights some aspects of human experience and covers up others. In our reading of the great texts that focused the epochs of Western history we ought, then, to look for whatever it was about those epochs that allowed them to avoid the problems we have, though it led to our
problems eventually. We begin this chapter with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the pinnacle of and paradigm for the High Middle Ages. The central feature of Dante's world is his sense that the universe is created by God, and therefore that its moral and spiritual meaning is written on its face. Medieval Christendom, in other words, was a world in which absolutely everything had its place. This is about as anti-nihilistic a universe as one can imagine. Far from there being no intrinsic mean-ings, the Medieval World is absolutely replete with them. We need to ask: Are there experiences at the margins of our own world that reflect the anti-nihilistic aspect of this medieval understanding? The medieval understanding of Creation is no longer accessible to the West in its original form. Even most believing Christians don't understand our world today as a created world in which every aspect of the universe has a God-given meaning that it wears on its face. Still, Dante's general idea, that we are free to retrain our desires so that they are directed toward what ultimately sustains and fulfills them—so that they become attuned, in other words, to the meanings that are already out there in the world—will turn out to hold an important clue for our nihilistic age. As we follow the stages by which our culture lost touch with the gods, and with them all mattering and meaning, Dante offers several other important insights. Within his work is a warning about the attraction of hell that we have yet to heed; a promising way to find meaning in our earthly lives, though he himself finally failed to ap-preciate it; and a stunning demonstration of how in the end the Greek understanding of reality undermines the Judeo-Christian revelation it was introduced to articulate.
CHRISTIANITY WAS VERY RADICAL, and it needed a lot of articulat-ing. For almost a thousand years the Western world tried unsuccess-fully to articulate Christianity in Platonic Greek terms. Augustine and other church fathers tried, in particular, to give a central place to an incarnate god while accepting Plato's adoration of an abstract eternity and his resulting denigration of the body. Then, a surprising breakthrough occurred. A bunch of lecture notes that had been de-caying in a cellar for years were rediscovered, translated into Arabic, eventually translated into Latin, and brought to the West. The author, Aristotle, turned out to be a brilliant critic of Plato's philosophy. He held that enduring, material things like trees and tables—not eternal, abstract ideas as in Plato—were the most real. He also contended that being embodied was not enfeebling or humiliat-ing, as Plato and Augustine had held. Rather, bodies were empower-ing, according to Aristotle; indeed, embodied individuals were more perfect than disembodied souls. Christian philosophers and theologians soon recognized that Ar-istotle, rather than Plato, was their man. They devoted themselves to making Christianity intelligible in Aristotelian terms. Greatest among these articulators was St. Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 until 1274 and who took on the huge task of writing a Summa Theologica, which reconciled in detail the Greek and Christian understandings of reality. And the great popularizer of St. Thomas's theology was Dante Alighieri, who lived a generation after St. Thomas. Dante laid out Thomas's achievement in a poem he called The Comedy. It was written in the vernacular, Italian, instead of scholarly Latin, and it focused and held up to the people of the day their medi-eval understanding of everything that is. In this way it was a work of art that functioned like a god. The "Historical Introduction" to The Inferno by Archibald MacAllister tells us that
before [Dante's] death in 1321 the first two parts [of The Com-edy] had already . . . achieved a reputation tinged with super-natural awe.'
No wonder that by the sixteenth century Dante's poem was recog-nized as sacred and thereafter called The Divine Comedy. Aristotle held that the world is hierarchically organized. That means not only that it is unified, but also that things are ranked within it with respect to how perfect they are. At the top of all this order is a being Aristotle called The Prime Mover. The Prime Mover, in its absolute perfection, draws all beings to itself. According to Aristotle, the hierarchical order is primarily manifest in the natural world. But the idea of a hierarchical universe in which everything has its place fit well with the Judeo-Christian belief in a creator God. In the Medieval World everything from lead to gold, from mice to elephants, and from sinners to saints was ranked. Even each type of sin was ranked. As Dante descends into Hell in the first part of The Divine Comedy, each type of sinful life he sees is worse than the one above it. Indeed, even the saints themselves are ranked! In the final part of the poem, as Dante is drawn upward toward Para-dise, the saints he meets are more and more saintly. One could call all this monolithic monotheism. There is no place for the poly-worlds of Homer or for the tragically conflicting situations of Aeschylus. Dante popularized St. Thomas's metaphysics and theology in his famous poem, but his initial motivation was much simpler than that. At the age of nine he had met an eight-year-old girl in Florence named Beatrice Portinari. He fell in love with her "at first sight." From that moment Dante took Beatrice to be his Lady, and he vowed to write a poem about her like nobody had ever written for his Lady before. And he did. The Divine Comedy is set in 1300, when Dante is thirty-five years old. He has gone "astray / from the straight road," he writes in the famous opening lines of the poem, and "woke to find myself alone in a dark wood." We know nothing of how Dante has gone astray, only that he has, and that he must undertake a journey, therefore, to save his soul. The journey itself, however, is clearer. It will take him through the entire Christian spiritual universe. First Dante must walk down through Hell itself, where he will see every type of sin that Christian-ity names, along with the punishments that are fit to each. Next he will ascend the mountain of Purgatory, where he will see the souls of those who sinned but repented, and the process of rehabilitation they must undergo. And finally, in Paradise, he will see the various types of saintly souls, and the increasingly blissful states they can achieve. In this way Dante will gain an understanding of precisely what a worthy life consists of and all the ways one can fail to achieve it. Along this journey Dante will have two guides. Through Hell and most of Purgatory the great Roman poet Virgil will lead the way. Vir-gil, however, is a peculiar choice to guide Dante through the Chris-tian universe. After all, he died before Jesus was born. Indeed, there are interesting ways in which Virgil's Roman Stoic philosophy leads him to misunderstand what matters in the Christian world. Finally, Virgil's understanding gives out altogether, since reason alone is not capable of comprehending Christian love. This is when Dante's sec-ond guide takes over. As he ascends through the various levels of Para-dise, his Lady Beatrice leads the way.
THE GATES OF HELL through which Dante and Virgil pass are in-scribed with a dedicatory poem that ends in the famous line: 'Aban-don all hope ye who enter here."' Hell is not only for those who have sinned but also for those who had the misfortune to live before or otherwise outside the influence of Christ. Of the nine circles in Hell, the least severe by far is the first circle, called Limbo, which is re-served for the virtuous pagans and unbaptized children. In Limbo Virgil finds his eternal home, along with the other great figures of the
Classical and Old Testament worlds: the poets like Homer and Ovid, the philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and until they were later rescued by Jesus, the Hebrews like Abraham, Noah, and David. The virtuous pagans never had a chance to be Christians, so the lives they lived were the best they could manage under the circumstances. In Limbo they continue their virtuous lives, acting with moderation and dignity. But they can sense that they are missing something. As Virgil says, they are spared the suffering of Hell except for one affliction: "that without hope we live on in desire."3 Sighing fills the air of Limbo, as the virtuous pagans sense the absence of something they cannot quite understand or articulate. In Dante's Christian world, to be a human being of any epoch is to have been created by God to need the total fulfillment He makes possible. But God's universe offers that fulfillment only if one gets in the right relation to it by catching the Christian mood of agape love. The prob-lem is that nobody knew this until Jesus came along and showed it, so the noble souls in Limbo have missed their chance. In the next four circles of Hell a variety of sinful souls are de-scribed: lustful, gluttonous, avaricious, and wrathful souls, among many others. Unlike the souls in Limbo, these are Christians who have gone astray. Without going into the details, it is worth point-ing out that their sins all have a certain structural similarity: they loved something that was not sufficient to fulfill their desires. The lustful, for example, loved the carnal delight of sex—they "sinned in the flesh."' Among these Dante counts not only Paolo and Francesca, whom we met in Chapter 1, but also Cleopatra, Tristan, and of course Helen and Paris. (Notice that Dante's interpretation of Helen is very different from Homer's.) The sin they share is to have wasted all their love on something that couldn't in the end offer spiritual fulfillment. Without considering Dante's positive alternative, one can see what he thinks is wrong with lives like these. The way Dante understands these sinners, they are various kinds of sex and love addicts. (Or they are addicted to food, or money, or even their own anger.) The struc-ture of addictions like these is uniquely unfulfilling. Consider an anal-ogy with an addiction to cigarettes. The addict keeps coming back for more of the thing he thinks will fulfill him, make him happy, or give his life meaning. It looks desirable, and therefore it seems as if it should satisfy his desires to have it. But in fact when a smoker has finished one cigarette, he's left only with a icraving for another. Ultimately such a sinner gets nothing but the desire for more of the unfulfilling thing. Dante is certainly right that a life devoted to this kind of addiction is to be avoided. But his Aristotelian picture gives him a particular analysis of the case. In his view God's perfection, like the perfection of the Prime Mover in Aristotle, draws everything to Him. Human beings, in particular, are born to be fulfilled by the direct experience of God. To let your love be averted from Him and aimed at anything else—even the Lady Beatrice—is to have lived an unfulfilled life. Whether it is possible to gain fulfillment through total commit-ment to another person or not, the souls deeper down in Hell have got a different problem. Within the fifth circle there is an enormous wall that separates upper from lower Hell. Within the wall is Hell proper, which Dante calls the City of Dis. (Dis is the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld, Hades.) In order to get to the bottom of Hell, and from there up to Purgatory and then Paradise, Dante and Virgil will have to pass through the City of Dis. Here is where Virgil's non-Christian background becomes a li-ability. In his capacity as tour guide, Virgil marches off to demand entrance through the imposing city gate. "Take heart," he tells his fearful charge.
Nothing can take our passage from us when such a power has given warrant for it.5
When he reaches the gate, however, and presumably demands access in the name of God, the group of guards at the gate run behind the wall: "I couldn't hear my Lord's words," Dante reports
but the pack that gathered round him suddenly broke away howling and . . . slammed the towering gate hard in his face.6
Virgil is stunned. "Who has forbidden me the halls of sorrow?" he wonders.' But Virgil misunderstands the spiritual layout of Hell. He thinks that the lowest circles of Hell must be like a sturdy prison built to keep the worst offenders in. After all, that is certainly what Hell would be like in the Roman world. And true to this pagan conception Virgil says at one point in describing the souls of Dis, "I will explain how each is prisoned, and why."' But the City of Dis is not a prison to keep the most sinful souls in; it is a fortress built to keep God out. Dante, the Christian, understands this immediately. He talks about how he was
. . . eager to learn what new estate of Hell those burning fortress walls enclosed.'
The City of Dis is a fortress instead of a prison because the souls who live within it have not just turned their love toward something less fulfilling than God; they have actively rejected Him. Saint Thomas distinguishes between carnal sin and spiritual sin, and that distinc-tion is mirrored in the geography of Dante's Hell. Carnal sin is loving good things such as food, sex, and material goods, but loving them too much. Such overvaluation is punished outside the wall of Dis. Spiritual sin, by contrast, is rejecting God's creation. The spiritual sin-ners have barricaded themselves inside the walls of Dis, and use their energy to keep God out. But why would anybody rebel against God? We can learn from Milton's Paradise Lost. There, Satan says he "would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." He resents being created by God so that he, Satan, can find peace and fulfillment only in contemplating Him. He wants to make up his own mind about what to worship. Likewise, Dante's Satan, and the rebellious angels who follow him and defend the wall of the City of Dis, are dedicated to freely choosing what satis-fies them. They reject God's creation in order to give things value as they see fit. Thus the sinners inside the City of Dis substitute for natu-ral attractions willfully and actively chosen ones. For example, inside Dis Dante finds the homosexuals who cruise in packs. In Dante's world this is a rebellious rejection of a natural desire for monogamous heterosexual love.'° An even more serious sin is the rejection of life itself, so suicides are punished even deeper inside the City of Dis. As we shall soon see, the further Dante goes down in Hell, the less open the shades become to the appeal of things stemming from God's love and the more they close in on themselves. Moreover, the further away from God the shades are, the less moved they are by love of him. God is after all the Prime Mover. As a result, the deeper they go, the less they can move. At the bottom of Hell the most serious sinners are literally frozen in a pool of ice. Because they were unmoved by any-thing in God's creation, they can't move at all. Milton's Protestant Hell is hot all the way down. We are used to an active, interventionist Satan at the head of armies of fallen angels. But Dante's Satan is so self-sufficient that he is not drawn to do anything. He is almost completely immobilized in the ice. All he can do is flap his wings, and indeed it is thanks to his flapping that Hell is frozen over." The Enlightenment admired all ways of life that strove for inde-pendence, so they praised the self-sufficiency that gave itself its own laws as autonomy. For the Medievals, however, to exclude oneself from bliss in order to save one's autonomy was the very essence of sin. Dante can thus be read as warning his contemporaries about the evils of autonomy. That warning could include those of our contem-poraries tempted by Nietzschean willfulness—such as David Foster Wallace, whom we have already discussed. In a creation that draws us toward what is fulfilling, the attempt to set up one's own values and assign one's own meaning to things rather than cultivate their latent meaning can lead to a sad sort of nihilism in which there is no mean-ing and nothing moves us at all.
DANTE NEEDS A PLACE for free will in his system. If your will ulti-mately has nothing to do with the kind of life you lived—if that life was preordained and there was nothing you could have done about it—then what sense does it make to reward or punish you for that life? But if Dante is against the kind of willful autonomy found in the City of Dis, how can he have any notion of freedom of the will? Dante does, indeed, have a place for free will in his system, but it's not the kind of free will we're used to. For one thing, freedom for Dante lies not in your ability to choose which life you're going to live or what actions you're going to perform, as we might imagine. In particu-lar, it doesn't involve freedom from some kind of external constraint upon your action. That's the kind of freedom that most naturally goes against a notion of determinism, and it's the kind of freedom we worry about most. But it's not at all what Dante has in mind. Rather, freedom according to Dante consists in being free to re-train your desires to focus on what will be fulfilling. In Dante's view the job of training one's desires lies principally with the State and the Church, and the problem with the modern world is that the State and the Church have failed to do their job.'2 Indeed, if we were raised properly and so had the right desires then each of us would go straight to God like an arrow shot from a bow.13 But even in Dante's world, when the Church and State are failing to train us properly, we have the freedom to retrain ourselves on our own if we so desire. That is the phenomenon described in detail in Dante's account of Purgatory. Dante's overall view is that the senses, and our desires, are bound by what grabs them, but we have the freedom to form those senses by means of our will and intellect so that the right things grab them. The reforming glutton, for example, can retrain himself in such a way as to no longer see food as the only object worthy of his desire. Former gluttons in Purgatory are actively engaged in this type of retraining. They agree to undergo the torture of Tantalus, a kind of forced diet-ing. The main difference between Hell and Purgatory, then, is that those in Hell embraced their bad desires, while those in Purgatory repented them. The act of repenting is the free act of the will on the basis of which one can be judged. Repentance puts one on the path to salvation, and the "punishment" consists in freely going through the regime of reforming one's senses and desires so that they are directed in the right way. All souls are naturally attracted to things in the world, according to Dante. How do we turn these attractions toward living a worthy life? Two options present themselves. The first says to try to withhold your desire, or even rid yourself of it. This is a typically Stoic type of approach, and it is the one that Virgil adopts. "Reason must guard the threshold of consent," he says.14 The appetites, in other words, are to be kept in check; reason must keep us from giving in to our desires. Dante has a different, Christian, view. All love is good in Dante's view as long as it is directed toward an appropriate object in an appro-priate way. He counters Virgil's Stoic view that free will should curb love with the Christian view that free will should direct love. Dante thinks that you should intensify your love and be committed to what-ever attracts you with total devotion, and then if it fails to satisfy you, which it surely will, you can learn from your mistakes until you finally find someone or something worthy of total passion and commitment. The last thing you should do is trim your desire. Free will allows you to train your desires in the right direction.
IT SEEMS AS THOUGH Dante admits a variety of desirable goals. At least that's what it looks like. The question is whether Dante can be consistent. In particular, the question is whether Dante thinks it is possible to find someone or something here on earth that is worthy of total passion and commitment. To the extent that he cannot, he runs the risk of recapitulating Augustine's error of giving an interpreta-tion of Christianity that can't make sense of an embodied, incarnated Christ.
prom Dante to Kant: The Attractions and Dangers ofAutonomy l 129
In his poem Dante does not neglect Jesus and seek access to an eternal disembodied God by way of his deepest inner self, as did Au-gustine. Dante was a totally outgoing person deeply involved in the politics of his city of Florence and also totally devoted to the woman who inspired his poem. Happily for him the early Christian mood of total devotion to Jesus had indirectly inspired a group of French poets called troubadours to develop a new understanding of love. It wasn't Greek erotic desire, but it wasn't Christian agape either. It was a new mood that came to be called courtly love. This new kind of love in-volved total devotion to a person who became the center of your life. Indeed, in the troubadour tradition your beloved actually gives you your identity. Without her you would cease to exist as the person you have become in loving her. You understand who you are entirely in relation to her, and therefore you are ready to die for her. In short, the troubadours invented romantic love and Dante was a romantic lover. The depth of Dante's devotion to Beatrice is signaled in his poem. In the middle of The Divine Comedy, at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, Dante witnesses a pageant of the books of the Bible; the pageant portrays the history of the church. In the middle of the pag-eant a cart arrives pulled by a griffin. The griffin is a traditional sym-bol for Jesus: as a beast with two natures it mirrors Him who was both man and God. The procession comes to a halt, and the cart stops just in front of Dante. In the cart he notices a hooded figure. Something is happening which is the culmination of the history of the church. Angels fly overhead singing, "Blessed is he who comes." We are fully prepared for the hood to pull back and reveal Jesus Christ. But here is where Dante makes his most audacious move. For the figure in the cart isn't Jesus; it's Beatrice! Dante has put his girlfriend in Jesus' place! Dante has put Beatrice in the place of Christ. He has, indeed, written a poem about his beloved that glorifies her more than any poet before him has ever exalted his Lady. There is something phenomenologically plausible about this as well. The phenomenon here is that love can draw one to another person so that she becomes the center of one's world. If one is blessed enough to be drawn into such a love, then everything in one's life makes sense in relation to her, and the sense it all makes is shining and glorious and completely satisfying. One understands oneself completely and hap-pily in terms of the definition this love gives to one's life. If this is the experience Dante had, then it is not crazy for him to see Beatrice in the role of Christ the Savior when he sees her in the pageant at the top of Purgatory. The mood of romantic love for an-other is not so far, after all, from the various forms of the sacred that we have seen up till now For one thing, it is not a feeling that one can choose. Like being guided by Athena or catching the contagious mood of agape in the presence of Jesus, romantic love too is some-thing that strikes one, takes one over. It demands a sense of gratitude. Finally, one understands exactly how to act on the basis of it. Roman-tic love gives one an attunement to a situation that makes everything matter in its appropriate degree. If Dante had stopped with Beatrice at the top of Purgatory, therefore, he'd have described a completely livable world that could bring joy and meaning into his life. Moreover, the kind of devotion that he has to Beatrice is devotion to her as a physical, embodied being. He talks about her beautiful green eyes, her lovely mouth, and especially her legs, in characterizing his total devotion. In this way Dante captures an essential part of the Christian intuition that the saving mood is one that happens in the physical, embodied world. If he finds his fulfillment in his commit-ment to Beatrice, then he has found a way to resist the Augustinian mistake of trying to interpret Christianity in a completely abstract and disembodied way. This is the moment when Dante has the chance to give an interpretation of Christianity that frees it from the Greek abstractions with which it is incompatible. Unfortunately, that is not the path Dante takes. The West will have to wait another five hundred years before Soren Kierkegaard de-velops the phenomenology of romantic love Dante began to describe. In Dante's case, although Beatrice does guide him through Paradise,
he does not find his life's meaning through his commitment to her. Rather, having guided Dante through the circles of Heaven, Beatrice returns to her seat in the rose in which the saved souls sit when con-templating God. Having placed her in the position of Savior, putting her in the place of the one St. John says is the truth and the way, Dante treats her as a ladder he can leave behind when he reaches God. For Beatrice herself is not the ultimate object of love in Dante's final picture.'5 She is the way but not the truth. When Beatrice returns to her seat, Dante can see her high up in the rose, right below St. Peter. She gives Dante one last smile, and then turns back to contemplate the radiance of God. Dante reports that: "Experiencing that radiance, it is impossible to think of ever turning from Beatrice has led Dante to achieve the beatific vision—a direct contemplation of God. But the bliss of God's love is so over-whelming that far from organizing his life and providing the point of all his actions, it takes him out of his life altogether. Instead of return-ing to politics with renewed vigor, or trying to live as Beatrice would have him do, Dante seems to lose all sense of himself as an individual. According to St. Thomas the beatitude caused by the contemplation of God's radiance is the ultimate goal of human life. The bliss of con-templating God is so overwhelming, however, that it makes all other earthly joys irrelevant. So Dante is never going to look back at Beatrice. -What had been the most important commitment in his life on earth turns out to be irrelevant to his fulfillment. In effect, the single most important distinction—the distinction between his love for Beatrice and every-thing else in his life—gets leveled by the bliss of contemplating God. Similarly, Dante's commitment to politics ends up looking irrel-evant. From his place in Paradise Dante looks back toward the earth and reports: "I saw this globe so lost in space that I had to smile at such a sorry show.'7 He sees that everything earthly, even politics, is trivial and says: "I saw the dusty little threshing ground that makes us ravenous for our mad sins."' Like his love of Beatrice, everything
political that was meaningful in his life has been trumped by God's radiance. Once Dante sees God, he is never going to turn away from God's radiance to take sides in politics or to gaze on Beatrice again.
lights some aspects of human experience and covers up others. In our reading of the great texts that focused the epochs of Western history we ought, then, to look for whatever it was about those epochs that allowed them to avoid the problems we have, though it led to our
problems eventually. We begin this chapter with Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the pinnacle of and paradigm for the High Middle Ages. The central feature of Dante's world is his sense that the universe is created by God, and therefore that its moral and spiritual meaning is written on its face. Medieval Christendom, in other words, was a world in which absolutely everything had its place. This is about as anti-nihilistic a universe as one can imagine. Far from there being no intrinsic mean-ings, the Medieval World is absolutely replete with them. We need to ask: Are there experiences at the margins of our own world that reflect the anti-nihilistic aspect of this medieval understanding? The medieval understanding of Creation is no longer accessible to the West in its original form. Even most believing Christians don't understand our world today as a created world in which every aspect of the universe has a God-given meaning that it wears on its face. Still, Dante's general idea, that we are free to retrain our desires so that they are directed toward what ultimately sustains and fulfills them—so that they become attuned, in other words, to the meanings that are already out there in the world—will turn out to hold an important clue for our nihilistic age. As we follow the stages by which our culture lost touch with the gods, and with them all mattering and meaning, Dante offers several other important insights. Within his work is a warning about the attraction of hell that we have yet to heed; a promising way to find meaning in our earthly lives, though he himself finally failed to ap-preciate it; and a stunning demonstration of how in the end the Greek understanding of reality undermines the Judeo-Christian revelation it was introduced to articulate.
CHRISTIANITY WAS VERY RADICAL, and it needed a lot of articulat-ing. For almost a thousand years the Western world tried unsuccess-fully to articulate Christianity in Platonic Greek terms. Augustine and other church fathers tried, in particular, to give a central place to an incarnate god while accepting Plato's adoration of an abstract eternity and his resulting denigration of the body. Then, a surprising breakthrough occurred. A bunch of lecture notes that had been de-caying in a cellar for years were rediscovered, translated into Arabic, eventually translated into Latin, and brought to the West. The author, Aristotle, turned out to be a brilliant critic of Plato's philosophy. He held that enduring, material things like trees and tables—not eternal, abstract ideas as in Plato—were the most real. He also contended that being embodied was not enfeebling or humiliat-ing, as Plato and Augustine had held. Rather, bodies were empower-ing, according to Aristotle; indeed, embodied individuals were more perfect than disembodied souls. Christian philosophers and theologians soon recognized that Ar-istotle, rather than Plato, was their man. They devoted themselves to making Christianity intelligible in Aristotelian terms. Greatest among these articulators was St. Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 until 1274 and who took on the huge task of writing a Summa Theologica, which reconciled in detail the Greek and Christian understandings of reality. And the great popularizer of St. Thomas's theology was Dante Alighieri, who lived a generation after St. Thomas. Dante laid out Thomas's achievement in a poem he called The Comedy. It was written in the vernacular, Italian, instead of scholarly Latin, and it focused and held up to the people of the day their medi-eval understanding of everything that is. In this way it was a work of art that functioned like a god. The "Historical Introduction" to The Inferno by Archibald MacAllister tells us that
before [Dante's] death in 1321 the first two parts [of The Com-edy] had already . . . achieved a reputation tinged with super-natural awe.'
No wonder that by the sixteenth century Dante's poem was recog-nized as sacred and thereafter called The Divine Comedy. Aristotle held that the world is hierarchically organized. That means not only that it is unified, but also that things are ranked within it with respect to how perfect they are. At the top of all this order is a being Aristotle called The Prime Mover. The Prime Mover, in its absolute perfection, draws all beings to itself. According to Aristotle, the hierarchical order is primarily manifest in the natural world. But the idea of a hierarchical universe in which everything has its place fit well with the Judeo-Christian belief in a creator God. In the Medieval World everything from lead to gold, from mice to elephants, and from sinners to saints was ranked. Even each type of sin was ranked. As Dante descends into Hell in the first part of The Divine Comedy, each type of sinful life he sees is worse than the one above it. Indeed, even the saints themselves are ranked! In the final part of the poem, as Dante is drawn upward toward Para-dise, the saints he meets are more and more saintly. One could call all this monolithic monotheism. There is no place for the poly-worlds of Homer or for the tragically conflicting situations of Aeschylus. Dante popularized St. Thomas's metaphysics and theology in his famous poem, but his initial motivation was much simpler than that. At the age of nine he had met an eight-year-old girl in Florence named Beatrice Portinari. He fell in love with her "at first sight." From that moment Dante took Beatrice to be his Lady, and he vowed to write a poem about her like nobody had ever written for his Lady before. And he did. The Divine Comedy is set in 1300, when Dante is thirty-five years old. He has gone "astray / from the straight road," he writes in the famous opening lines of the poem, and "woke to find myself alone in a dark wood." We know nothing of how Dante has gone astray, only that he has, and that he must undertake a journey, therefore, to save his soul. The journey itself, however, is clearer. It will take him through the entire Christian spiritual universe. First Dante must walk down through Hell itself, where he will see every type of sin that Christian-ity names, along with the punishments that are fit to each. Next he will ascend the mountain of Purgatory, where he will see the souls of those who sinned but repented, and the process of rehabilitation they must undergo. And finally, in Paradise, he will see the various types of saintly souls, and the increasingly blissful states they can achieve. In this way Dante will gain an understanding of precisely what a worthy life consists of and all the ways one can fail to achieve it. Along this journey Dante will have two guides. Through Hell and most of Purgatory the great Roman poet Virgil will lead the way. Vir-gil, however, is a peculiar choice to guide Dante through the Chris-tian universe. After all, he died before Jesus was born. Indeed, there are interesting ways in which Virgil's Roman Stoic philosophy leads him to misunderstand what matters in the Christian world. Finally, Virgil's understanding gives out altogether, since reason alone is not capable of comprehending Christian love. This is when Dante's sec-ond guide takes over. As he ascends through the various levels of Para-dise, his Lady Beatrice leads the way.
THE GATES OF HELL through which Dante and Virgil pass are in-scribed with a dedicatory poem that ends in the famous line: 'Aban-don all hope ye who enter here."' Hell is not only for those who have sinned but also for those who had the misfortune to live before or otherwise outside the influence of Christ. Of the nine circles in Hell, the least severe by far is the first circle, called Limbo, which is re-served for the virtuous pagans and unbaptized children. In Limbo Virgil finds his eternal home, along with the other great figures of the
Classical and Old Testament worlds: the poets like Homer and Ovid, the philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, and until they were later rescued by Jesus, the Hebrews like Abraham, Noah, and David. The virtuous pagans never had a chance to be Christians, so the lives they lived were the best they could manage under the circumstances. In Limbo they continue their virtuous lives, acting with moderation and dignity. But they can sense that they are missing something. As Virgil says, they are spared the suffering of Hell except for one affliction: "that without hope we live on in desire."3 Sighing fills the air of Limbo, as the virtuous pagans sense the absence of something they cannot quite understand or articulate. In Dante's Christian world, to be a human being of any epoch is to have been created by God to need the total fulfillment He makes possible. But God's universe offers that fulfillment only if one gets in the right relation to it by catching the Christian mood of agape love. The prob-lem is that nobody knew this until Jesus came along and showed it, so the noble souls in Limbo have missed their chance. In the next four circles of Hell a variety of sinful souls are de-scribed: lustful, gluttonous, avaricious, and wrathful souls, among many others. Unlike the souls in Limbo, these are Christians who have gone astray. Without going into the details, it is worth point-ing out that their sins all have a certain structural similarity: they loved something that was not sufficient to fulfill their desires. The lustful, for example, loved the carnal delight of sex—they "sinned in the flesh."' Among these Dante counts not only Paolo and Francesca, whom we met in Chapter 1, but also Cleopatra, Tristan, and of course Helen and Paris. (Notice that Dante's interpretation of Helen is very different from Homer's.) The sin they share is to have wasted all their love on something that couldn't in the end offer spiritual fulfillment. Without considering Dante's positive alternative, one can see what he thinks is wrong with lives like these. The way Dante understands these sinners, they are various kinds of sex and love addicts. (Or they are addicted to food, or money, or even their own anger.) The struc-ture of addictions like these is uniquely unfulfilling. Consider an anal-ogy with an addiction to cigarettes. The addict keeps coming back for more of the thing he thinks will fulfill him, make him happy, or give his life meaning. It looks desirable, and therefore it seems as if it should satisfy his desires to have it. But in fact when a smoker has finished one cigarette, he's left only with a icraving for another. Ultimately such a sinner gets nothing but the desire for more of the unfulfilling thing. Dante is certainly right that a life devoted to this kind of addiction is to be avoided. But his Aristotelian picture gives him a particular analysis of the case. In his view God's perfection, like the perfection of the Prime Mover in Aristotle, draws everything to Him. Human beings, in particular, are born to be fulfilled by the direct experience of God. To let your love be averted from Him and aimed at anything else—even the Lady Beatrice—is to have lived an unfulfilled life. Whether it is possible to gain fulfillment through total commit-ment to another person or not, the souls deeper down in Hell have got a different problem. Within the fifth circle there is an enormous wall that separates upper from lower Hell. Within the wall is Hell proper, which Dante calls the City of Dis. (Dis is the Roman name for the Greek god of the underworld, Hades.) In order to get to the bottom of Hell, and from there up to Purgatory and then Paradise, Dante and Virgil will have to pass through the City of Dis. Here is where Virgil's non-Christian background becomes a li-ability. In his capacity as tour guide, Virgil marches off to demand entrance through the imposing city gate. "Take heart," he tells his fearful charge.
Nothing can take our passage from us when such a power has given warrant for it.5
When he reaches the gate, however, and presumably demands access in the name of God, the group of guards at the gate run behind the wall: "I couldn't hear my Lord's words," Dante reports
but the pack that gathered round him suddenly broke away howling and . . . slammed the towering gate hard in his face.6
Virgil is stunned. "Who has forbidden me the halls of sorrow?" he wonders.' But Virgil misunderstands the spiritual layout of Hell. He thinks that the lowest circles of Hell must be like a sturdy prison built to keep the worst offenders in. After all, that is certainly what Hell would be like in the Roman world. And true to this pagan conception Virgil says at one point in describing the souls of Dis, "I will explain how each is prisoned, and why."' But the City of Dis is not a prison to keep the most sinful souls in; it is a fortress built to keep God out. Dante, the Christian, understands this immediately. He talks about how he was
. . . eager to learn what new estate of Hell those burning fortress walls enclosed.'
The City of Dis is a fortress instead of a prison because the souls who live within it have not just turned their love toward something less fulfilling than God; they have actively rejected Him. Saint Thomas distinguishes between carnal sin and spiritual sin, and that distinc-tion is mirrored in the geography of Dante's Hell. Carnal sin is loving good things such as food, sex, and material goods, but loving them too much. Such overvaluation is punished outside the wall of Dis. Spiritual sin, by contrast, is rejecting God's creation. The spiritual sin-ners have barricaded themselves inside the walls of Dis, and use their energy to keep God out. But why would anybody rebel against God? We can learn from Milton's Paradise Lost. There, Satan says he "would rather rule in Hell than serve in Heaven." He resents being created by God so that he, Satan, can find peace and fulfillment only in contemplating Him. He wants to make up his own mind about what to worship. Likewise, Dante's Satan, and the rebellious angels who follow him and defend the wall of the City of Dis, are dedicated to freely choosing what satis-fies them. They reject God's creation in order to give things value as they see fit. Thus the sinners inside the City of Dis substitute for natu-ral attractions willfully and actively chosen ones. For example, inside Dis Dante finds the homosexuals who cruise in packs. In Dante's world this is a rebellious rejection of a natural desire for monogamous heterosexual love.'° An even more serious sin is the rejection of life itself, so suicides are punished even deeper inside the City of Dis. As we shall soon see, the further Dante goes down in Hell, the less open the shades become to the appeal of things stemming from God's love and the more they close in on themselves. Moreover, the further away from God the shades are, the less moved they are by love of him. God is after all the Prime Mover. As a result, the deeper they go, the less they can move. At the bottom of Hell the most serious sinners are literally frozen in a pool of ice. Because they were unmoved by any-thing in God's creation, they can't move at all. Milton's Protestant Hell is hot all the way down. We are used to an active, interventionist Satan at the head of armies of fallen angels. But Dante's Satan is so self-sufficient that he is not drawn to do anything. He is almost completely immobilized in the ice. All he can do is flap his wings, and indeed it is thanks to his flapping that Hell is frozen over." The Enlightenment admired all ways of life that strove for inde-pendence, so they praised the self-sufficiency that gave itself its own laws as autonomy. For the Medievals, however, to exclude oneself from bliss in order to save one's autonomy was the very essence of sin. Dante can thus be read as warning his contemporaries about the evils of autonomy. That warning could include those of our contem-poraries tempted by Nietzschean willfulness—such as David Foster Wallace, whom we have already discussed. In a creation that draws us toward what is fulfilling, the attempt to set up one's own values and assign one's own meaning to things rather than cultivate their latent meaning can lead to a sad sort of nihilism in which there is no mean-ing and nothing moves us at all.
DANTE NEEDS A PLACE for free will in his system. If your will ulti-mately has nothing to do with the kind of life you lived—if that life was preordained and there was nothing you could have done about it—then what sense does it make to reward or punish you for that life? But if Dante is against the kind of willful autonomy found in the City of Dis, how can he have any notion of freedom of the will? Dante does, indeed, have a place for free will in his system, but it's not the kind of free will we're used to. For one thing, freedom for Dante lies not in your ability to choose which life you're going to live or what actions you're going to perform, as we might imagine. In particu-lar, it doesn't involve freedom from some kind of external constraint upon your action. That's the kind of freedom that most naturally goes against a notion of determinism, and it's the kind of freedom we worry about most. But it's not at all what Dante has in mind. Rather, freedom according to Dante consists in being free to re-train your desires to focus on what will be fulfilling. In Dante's view the job of training one's desires lies principally with the State and the Church, and the problem with the modern world is that the State and the Church have failed to do their job.'2 Indeed, if we were raised properly and so had the right desires then each of us would go straight to God like an arrow shot from a bow.13 But even in Dante's world, when the Church and State are failing to train us properly, we have the freedom to retrain ourselves on our own if we so desire. That is the phenomenon described in detail in Dante's account of Purgatory. Dante's overall view is that the senses, and our desires, are bound by what grabs them, but we have the freedom to form those senses by means of our will and intellect so that the right things grab them. The reforming glutton, for example, can retrain himself in such a way as to no longer see food as the only object worthy of his desire. Former gluttons in Purgatory are actively engaged in this type of retraining. They agree to undergo the torture of Tantalus, a kind of forced diet-ing. The main difference between Hell and Purgatory, then, is that those in Hell embraced their bad desires, while those in Purgatory repented them. The act of repenting is the free act of the will on the basis of which one can be judged. Repentance puts one on the path to salvation, and the "punishment" consists in freely going through the regime of reforming one's senses and desires so that they are directed in the right way. All souls are naturally attracted to things in the world, according to Dante. How do we turn these attractions toward living a worthy life? Two options present themselves. The first says to try to withhold your desire, or even rid yourself of it. This is a typically Stoic type of approach, and it is the one that Virgil adopts. "Reason must guard the threshold of consent," he says.14 The appetites, in other words, are to be kept in check; reason must keep us from giving in to our desires. Dante has a different, Christian, view. All love is good in Dante's view as long as it is directed toward an appropriate object in an appro-priate way. He counters Virgil's Stoic view that free will should curb love with the Christian view that free will should direct love. Dante thinks that you should intensify your love and be committed to what-ever attracts you with total devotion, and then if it fails to satisfy you, which it surely will, you can learn from your mistakes until you finally find someone or something worthy of total passion and commitment. The last thing you should do is trim your desire. Free will allows you to train your desires in the right direction.
IT SEEMS AS THOUGH Dante admits a variety of desirable goals. At least that's what it looks like. The question is whether Dante can be consistent. In particular, the question is whether Dante thinks it is possible to find someone or something here on earth that is worthy of total passion and commitment. To the extent that he cannot, he runs the risk of recapitulating Augustine's error of giving an interpreta-tion of Christianity that can't make sense of an embodied, incarnated Christ.
prom Dante to Kant: The Attractions and Dangers ofAutonomy l 129
In his poem Dante does not neglect Jesus and seek access to an eternal disembodied God by way of his deepest inner self, as did Au-gustine. Dante was a totally outgoing person deeply involved in the politics of his city of Florence and also totally devoted to the woman who inspired his poem. Happily for him the early Christian mood of total devotion to Jesus had indirectly inspired a group of French poets called troubadours to develop a new understanding of love. It wasn't Greek erotic desire, but it wasn't Christian agape either. It was a new mood that came to be called courtly love. This new kind of love in-volved total devotion to a person who became the center of your life. Indeed, in the troubadour tradition your beloved actually gives you your identity. Without her you would cease to exist as the person you have become in loving her. You understand who you are entirely in relation to her, and therefore you are ready to die for her. In short, the troubadours invented romantic love and Dante was a romantic lover. The depth of Dante's devotion to Beatrice is signaled in his poem. In the middle of The Divine Comedy, at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, Dante witnesses a pageant of the books of the Bible; the pageant portrays the history of the church. In the middle of the pag-eant a cart arrives pulled by a griffin. The griffin is a traditional sym-bol for Jesus: as a beast with two natures it mirrors Him who was both man and God. The procession comes to a halt, and the cart stops just in front of Dante. In the cart he notices a hooded figure. Something is happening which is the culmination of the history of the church. Angels fly overhead singing, "Blessed is he who comes." We are fully prepared for the hood to pull back and reveal Jesus Christ. But here is where Dante makes his most audacious move. For the figure in the cart isn't Jesus; it's Beatrice! Dante has put his girlfriend in Jesus' place! Dante has put Beatrice in the place of Christ. He has, indeed, written a poem about his beloved that glorifies her more than any poet before him has ever exalted his Lady. There is something phenomenologically plausible about this as well. The phenomenon here is that love can draw one to another person so that she becomes the center of one's world. If one is blessed enough to be drawn into such a love, then everything in one's life makes sense in relation to her, and the sense it all makes is shining and glorious and completely satisfying. One understands oneself completely and hap-pily in terms of the definition this love gives to one's life. If this is the experience Dante had, then it is not crazy for him to see Beatrice in the role of Christ the Savior when he sees her in the pageant at the top of Purgatory. The mood of romantic love for an-other is not so far, after all, from the various forms of the sacred that we have seen up till now For one thing, it is not a feeling that one can choose. Like being guided by Athena or catching the contagious mood of agape in the presence of Jesus, romantic love too is some-thing that strikes one, takes one over. It demands a sense of gratitude. Finally, one understands exactly how to act on the basis of it. Roman-tic love gives one an attunement to a situation that makes everything matter in its appropriate degree. If Dante had stopped with Beatrice at the top of Purgatory, therefore, he'd have described a completely livable world that could bring joy and meaning into his life. Moreover, the kind of devotion that he has to Beatrice is devotion to her as a physical, embodied being. He talks about her beautiful green eyes, her lovely mouth, and especially her legs, in characterizing his total devotion. In this way Dante captures an essential part of the Christian intuition that the saving mood is one that happens in the physical, embodied world. If he finds his fulfillment in his commit-ment to Beatrice, then he has found a way to resist the Augustinian mistake of trying to interpret Christianity in a completely abstract and disembodied way. This is the moment when Dante has the chance to give an interpretation of Christianity that frees it from the Greek abstractions with which it is incompatible. Unfortunately, that is not the path Dante takes. The West will have to wait another five hundred years before Soren Kierkegaard de-velops the phenomenology of romantic love Dante began to describe. In Dante's case, although Beatrice does guide him through Paradise,
he does not find his life's meaning through his commitment to her. Rather, having guided Dante through the circles of Heaven, Beatrice returns to her seat in the rose in which the saved souls sit when con-templating God. Having placed her in the position of Savior, putting her in the place of the one St. John says is the truth and the way, Dante treats her as a ladder he can leave behind when he reaches God. For Beatrice herself is not the ultimate object of love in Dante's final picture.'5 She is the way but not the truth. When Beatrice returns to her seat, Dante can see her high up in the rose, right below St. Peter. She gives Dante one last smile, and then turns back to contemplate the radiance of God. Dante reports that: "Experiencing that radiance, it is impossible to think of ever turning from Beatrice has led Dante to achieve the beatific vision—a direct contemplation of God. But the bliss of God's love is so over-whelming that far from organizing his life and providing the point of all his actions, it takes him out of his life altogether. Instead of return-ing to politics with renewed vigor, or trying to live as Beatrice would have him do, Dante seems to lose all sense of himself as an individual. According to St. Thomas the beatitude caused by the contemplation of God's radiance is the ultimate goal of human life. The bliss of con-templating God is so overwhelming, however, that it makes all other earthly joys irrelevant. So Dante is never going to look back at Beatrice. -What had been the most important commitment in his life on earth turns out to be irrelevant to his fulfillment. In effect, the single most important distinction—the distinction between his love for Beatrice and every-thing else in his life—gets leveled by the bliss of contemplating God. Similarly, Dante's commitment to politics ends up looking irrel-evant. From his place in Paradise Dante looks back toward the earth and reports: "I saw this globe so lost in space that I had to smile at such a sorry show.'7 He sees that everything earthly, even politics, is trivial and says: "I saw the dusty little threshing ground that makes us ravenous for our mad sins."' Like his love of Beatrice, everything
political that was meaningful in his life has been trumped by God's radiance. Once Dante sees God, he is never going to turn away from God's radiance to take sides in politics or to gaze on Beatrice again.
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