For the hell of it

This op-ed of mine about Dante's Divine Comedy (and us), came out in yesterday's Gazette-Mail.

No human creation is perfect, but one that comes pretty close in my book is Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Its three books, or canticles, provide a guided tour of hell, purgatory, and paradise through the eyes of the poet and summarize the Christian theology, philosophy and world view of much of medieval Europe.

The opening line of the “Inferno” is one many can relate to: “In the middle of our life’s journey, I awoke to find myself in a dark wood, having lost the true path.” Dante is in fact so lost that, with the help of divine intervention, he has to literally go through hell to find salvation.

That rings true for me in more ways than one.

Along the way, he is aided by the spirit of Beatrice, someone he loved from afar in his youth, and by the ancient pagan Roman poet Virgil. Beatrice symbolizes divine grace, while Virgil represents human effort and reason. Both are needed, but human effort can only go so far. In the end it must give way to help from above. Virgil speaks less and less as the story continues and disappears completely near the top of Purgatory, while Beatrice takes the lead.

If Dante is read at all these days, most stop with the “Inferno.” Its appeal is understandable, but stopping there is a bit like walking out of a good movie half an hour into it.


His hell is like an inverted funnel that gets worse as you go deeper. He classifies sins differently than we might today. The least bad places there are are for those who lacked self-control in life. Then come the abodes of the violent. The worst part, which is ice cold, is reserved for deceivers and traitors.

Generally, punishments fit the crime by resembling or contrasting with the sin itself. For example, those given to lust in life are driven around in a violent wind, while fortune tellers walk eternally with their heads on backwards. The term for this is “contrapasso.”

Lowest of all is Satan, “the Emperor of the sorrowful kingdom,” who betrayed his creator. In a dark parody of the Trinity, he has three mouths which gnaw on Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Julius Caesar, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus.

After you go so far down, you often wind up going up, which is what happens to Dante and Virgil. I hope it happens to us as well.

After descending to the bottom of hell, they wind up on the opposite side of the world at the mountain of Purgatory, where the souls of those who are saved but still tainted by sin are purified.

(So much for the idea that medieval people believed the world was flat.)

Purgatory is a seven-story mountain or wedding cake where one by one each of the seven deadly sins is cleansed, again with the penance fitting the crime. Pride is purged by carrying heavy weights, which keep the penitent from looking up. Lust is purified in a fire so hot that Dante says he’d have gladly jumped into molten glass to cool off.

Those in Purgatory who are destined for salvation are not any better than those in hell. The only difference is that they repented of their sins. As Beatrice says, “When condemnation of the sin bursts forth from the sinner’s lips, here in our court the stone is turned back against the blade.”

Dante’s heaven is pretty trippy. There are different levels or spheres according to the capacity of those who are saved. It’s a bit like the mother of all light shows, where some are closer to the stage than others, but everyone can see as much of it as they can handle.

His journey involves conversations with saints and saved souls, as well as a warning from his ancestor that he must prepare for a life of exile from his beloved city of Florence (he was exiled in 1302 when political winds shifted and never returned).

At last, he is granted a vision of God words cannot describe. He ends the poem by saying that “like a wheel in perfect balance turning, I felt my will and my desire impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

May we all end up that way ...

It’s an amazing work, one that can also be read as a poem of exile and even of politics. It’s hard to doubt that he enjoyed handing out real estate in hell to his opponents, including some corrupt popes. Many commentators have also noticed that hell seems to have more than its share of Florentines.

I’ve often thought that it would be interesting if he could be brought back to bring the “Divine Comedy” up — or down — to date. A U.S. or even West Virginia specific version of “Inferno” would be really cool — or maybe ice cold. I might even have a suggestion or two. For example, the evil genius who first came up with the idea of separating surface rights from mineral rights, which has caused so much suffering here, surely deserves s special spot.

I imagine that one circle of hell that might be getting a lot of business soon (unless people repent, of course) is that of false counselors, those who used their words, power and influence to promote unjust causes. Such people who inflamed others with their speech are themselves encased in flame in the eighth circle of hell.

There are plenty of voices of hatred today inflaming our worst fears and passions. My wish is that, when we hear them in the land of the living, we follow the advice of Virgil where he says of other lost souls, “Mercy and justice deny them even a name. Do not speak of them. Look and pass on.”

Angels and memory

I just finished making my way through Dante's Divine Comedy for the umpteenth time. Every time I read it I come across something I'd missed before. This time I was struck and mildly amused by the discussions between the Pilgrim and his beloved Beatrice in Paradise.

When she's not chewing the poet out, she sometimes sounds like the host of Mr. Wizard's 14th Century Science World as she discusses the fine points of late medieval cosmology. At other times she enters upon long theological digressions and the occasional rant.

I particularly enjoyed her detailed discussion of angelology in Canto 29. According to her, and she was in a position to know in the context of the poem, angels possess will and intellect but--contrary to popular opinion on earth--they have no memory and no need of it because they are always gazing at the mind of God:

From the first moment these beings found their bliss
within God's face in which all is revealed,
they never turned their eyes away from It;

hence, no new object interrupts their sight
and hence, they have no need of memory
since they do not possess divided thought.

So there you have it. She didn't discuss the whole how many on the head of a pin thing however.

AT THE OTHER END OF THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING, Massey officials may face more criminal charges in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine disaster which killed 29 miners in April 2010.

OCCUPATIONS. The future of the Occupy Wall Street movement is considered here.

SUPERSTITIOUS? It may help.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LIKE A WHEEL IN PERFECT BALANCE TURNING

You may have heard the saying "Everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die." In Dante's Divine Comedy, that wasn't the case, although the pilgrim had to literally go through hell to do it.

Dante's trip to Heaven is the topic for this last post in a two week series on the Comedy aimed at encouraging you, Gentle Reader, to give it a try. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts. You will also find links and comments about current events.

After being purified of his sins in Purgatory (see yesterday), the beloved Beatrice guides Dante on a tour of Heaven, with plenty of help from other blessed souls, including St. Bernard.

Holy light show, Batman! The souls of the blessed just love dazzling Dante as he ascends through several spheres of Heaven, which correspond to what was known about astronomy. As with hell and Purgatory, there are different levels in Heaven, according to the capacity of the souls. Everybody is blissed out, but some get better seats.

The spheres Dante and Beatrice ascend include the moon (where people who broke their vows abide), Mercury (for those who desired fame), Venus (people motivated by love), the Sun (the wise), Mars (those who fought for the faith), and so on. He has many encounters with various saints, kings, and famous people, including Cacciaguida, his great-great grandfather.

Cacciaguida gives Dante good advice for bearing up to the sorrows to come. He is told that he will have to live in exile and know what it's like "to climb another's stair" and "how salty is the bread of strangers." Cacciaguida advises him not to be consumed with the typical exile's bitterness and scheming to return. Neither should he give way to the excessive partisanship that devastated Italy, but instead become "a party of yourself" and carry out his mission of writing of what he has experienced.

As was the case with Inferno and Purgatory, Dante's Heaven has interesting characteristics. On the one hand, it seems to go up and up through successive and widening spheres. However, this is just an illusion to make it more comprehensible to the pilgrim. In reality, Heaven is like an atom with God at the very center and with all the souls of the saved surrounding and gazing in awe and wonder at the beatific vision.

At the very end, after passing a quiz by some apostles, Dante is given a chance to look at God, which is indescribable. Here are some lines from Longfellow's translation:

Thenceforward, what I saw,
Was not for words to speak, nor memory's self
To stand against such outrage on her skill.
As one, who from a dream awaken'd, straight,
All he hath seen forgets; yet still retains
Impression of the feeling in his dream;
E'en such am I: for all the vision dies,
As 't were, away; and yet the sense of sweet,
That sprang from it, still trickles in my heart.

I love the last line:

...like a wheel in perfect balance turning, I felt my will and my desire impelled by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

Wouldn't it be nice to wind up like that at the end of the road?

THE MIDDLE CLASS SQUEEZE. Here's an interesting item from the Campaign for America's Future about the growing economic crisis many families are experiencing. And here's Paul Krugman's latest column on the possible role of the economy in the coming election.

GREEN JOBS are a major goal for unions.

AND THE HORSE THEY RODE IN ON. Here's an interesting book review on proto Indo-European culture, critters and languages.

WEST VIRGINIA VIEWS. In this op-ed, Ted Boettner and Renate Pore make the case for public investments in health, education and infrastructure. And in this one, state AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Larry Matheney discusses the Worker Freedom Bill, which threw organized business in WV into a hissy fit.

URGENT INDONESIAN HOBBIT UPDATE. Remember those fossilized little guys they found over there? They may have been humans with a severe iodine deficiency.

I GOT ALL EXCITED ABOUT THIS ONE. The headline from this Science Daily item mentioned fossils of giant bats, but the biggest only weighed half a pound. I'm sure that's very respectable for bats and proud we are of all of them, as Maude Lebowski would say. But still it was kind of a letdown. I was hoping for maybe a 20 foot wingspan and all I got was a half-pounder...

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED