Stasis

This week, I have been thinking about Dante Alighieri, who died seven hundred years ago in September 1321, after contracting malaria while travelling from Venice back to Ravenna, where he lived in exile.  In 1300, he had been caught up in one of those violent Florentine factional conflicts that erupted periodically, a fate that was to befall Niccolò Machiavelli two hundred years later.  In Dante’s case the White Guelph party, of which he was a member, were thrown out of power by the Black Guelph party, working in collusion with the King of France’s brother.  Dante was travelling back from Rome, after an unsuccessful diplomatic mission to the Pope, when he heard the news of his banishment, and he never again set foot in the city of his birth.  In Canto XVII of Paradiso, written fifteen years later, he makes this prophesy to his younger self:  Thou shalt by sharp experience be aware / how salt the bread of strangers is, how hard / the up and down of someone else’s stair.

The Commedia is a long poem, rich in symbolism and allusion, and the modern reader requires the help of an expert commentary to decode its references.  As he is led by Virgil, downwards though hell and then upwards through purgatory, on his way to meet with Beatrice who will be his guide in heaven, Dante encounters a wide range of characters whose punishments and burdens are made exemplary for the reader.  Many of the individuals he writes about are of interest today for the role they play in his narrative: their fate, to be famous only as the objects of his scorn.  Dante knew that there was no reliably consistent agent of justice here on earth, for which reason he enacted a literary vengeance, traducing the reputation of his enemies through his description of their eternal punishment for crimes they had committed with apparent impunity. 

One of the pleasures of his poetry is to observe Dante’s sense of what counts as bad, and within the category of bad, what counts as major rather than minor.  His value system is close enough to contemporary conceptions of right and wrong to be comprehensible to the reader, but sufficiently different to be provocative to certain modern sensibilities.   It is no surprise that moneylenders are to be found in hell, although I find it curious that they are as low as the seventh circle (there are nine circles in all, some of which have sub-divisions), where they are grouped with sodomites and blasphemers.  Dante, following Aristotle, considered the charging of interest for loans to be an affront to Nature and thus to the Creator, for which reason moneylending is treated as an act of violence against God.   One of his prime examples is Rinaldo degli Scrovegni, a well-known usurer, whose son, Enrico, sought to atone for his father’s sins by building a chapel, which he paid Giotto to decorate with frescoes.  Dante was, coincidentally, a friend of Giotto and is thought to have visited him while he painted the walls of the Arena Chapel in Padua. 

What does provoke surprise is to encounter Ulysses in the lower sub-divisions of the eighth circle of hell.  Today, he is admired for his tricks and stratagems, both in the capture of Troy, where he designed the wooden horse in which the Greek troops concealed themselves, and during his decade long voyage home to Ithaca.  Yet, in Dante’s telling, we encounter this Homeric hero close to the very bottom pit of hell, in the area reserved for deceivers and counsellors of fraud.  That the Italians traced their ancestry from the Trojans, who were led into exile by Aeneas after their city had been destroyed by the Greeks, a story retold most famously by Virgil himself, suggests one reason for this indictment.  Ulysses provides his own account in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, to which I will return shortly. 

What must have caused greater surprise to his contemporaries was Dante’s treatment of church leaders, notably the recent Popes.  He describes a figure, stuck headfirst in a hole with his legs dangling out and his feet on fire. This turns out to be Pope Nicholas III, who is being punished for simony (the buying or selling religious offices, that is, the sin of using profane wealth to secure sacred gifts).  He is waiting for Pope Boniface VIII, with whom Dante had failed to come to agreement on his trip to Rome, to die and be condemned to replace him in the mouth of the hole, shunting Nicholas further in, no doubt to suffer additional, less visible torments.   This imagined tube of corrupt Popes – heads buried deep in the rocks, toes alight, humiliated for all eternity owing to their corruption – is one of the great visual portraits in the poem.  Dante was merciless in his attacks on Boniface, reprising the theme in Canto XXVII of Paradiso, where he uses the voice of Saint Peter to denounce him in passionate, irrevocable language.     

One challenge for the modern reader of the Commedia is its theological framework.  Dante’s journey down into hell, back up through purgatory, and then further on up into heaven, invites the reader to imagine a highly structured, physical representation of the three worlds that await us after death.  We are encouraged to accept without regret the harsh character of divine justice, for those who suffer eternal torment.  The joys and splendours of heaven are palpable, but there is a great deal of penitence that must be endured beforehand.  It would be easy for the citizens of contemporary secular societies to shrug and say that Dante’s poetry is interesting primarily as a document of history, from which we learn only how far our moral sensitivities have progressed in the last seven hundred years.  Easy but wrong because there is a secularized version of Dante which remains compelling.

I have just finished reading a thoughtful book by Peter E Gordon, an intellectual historian who writes about twentieth century German philosophers.  In Migrants in the Profane, his theme is the continuing usefulness of certain theological ideas, images, and arguments for secular thinkers, who discard their religious contents but continue to find value in their formal qualities.  The claim, which I find persuasive, is that modern thinkers can re-purpose old ideas, stripping them of historical baggage that is no longer credible, and using them in new ways to find answers to contemporary problems.      

One of the most striking features of Dante’s portrait of hell is its finality: “Abandon all hope, those who enter here” is the motto above the entry gate.  Once the damned have been sent here, there is no escape.  Not only that, but there is no further movement for them: they are consigned to a particular circle, or level, in hell and there they remain for eternity, subject to whatever local forms torment takes.   By contrast, purgatory is a place of movement – slow and gradual for sure – upwards towards heaven, for those whose sins are ultimately remedial are required to undergo the work of repentance, and in doing so they make progress.  The damned remain in the same spot in perpetuity, whereas those who are preparing themselves for paradise are in constant motion.

At this point, I want to return to Ulysses.  Dante did not read Greek and therefore his knowledge of the Achaean myths was drawn not from Homer, but the Latin poets whom he could read, pre-eminently Virgil and Ovid.  In the Inferno Dante allows Ulysses opportunity to explain his fate, which is rather different from that presented in Homer’s version.  Instead of returning to Ithaca, where his wife and son awaited him, he submits to his “desire to rove” and urges his crew to sail with him, beyond the Pillars of Hercules that guard the entrance to the Mediterranean, and onwards, westwards into the unknown.  After five months of sailing, a huge mountain comes into view, higher than anything seen before by humans.  As the ship approaches a violent storm engulfs them and their boat is overturned.  Ulysses and his crew are swallowed by the ocean, and drown.

Dante’s account provided inspiration to the Victorian poet, Alfred Tennyson, whose Ulysses tells of a man grown bored by homely pursuits, who rallies his sailing companions for one last voyage.  The hero tells us that he has always roamed “with a hungry heart”, and then complains, “how dull it is to pause, to make an end”.    So, he rouses his crew and encourages them to believe that although old, “some work of noble note, may yet be done”.  We are, he acknowledges, “made weak by time and fate”, but nonetheless he urges them on, “strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”  This vision of life, with its vivid description of the endless search for knowledge and novelty, is the antithesis of the portrait of hell in Inferno.  Whatever the literary or cultural reasons for Dante consigning Ulysses to the pit, he clearly does not belong there for he is a man who is never stationary.  He is a seeker, both in mind and body, and his restlessness provides us moderns with a metaphor for our own lives. 

Life is movement.  At the very start of the Commedia, Dante describes the bleak state of paralysis into which he had fallen: At the mid-point of the path through life I found / Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way / Ahead was blotted out …  He is stuck, motionless, unable to make progress, until Virgil rescues him, by leading him down through the multi-levels of hell and then back up through purgatory to Beatrice.  Whether fast or slow, whether effortless or burdened, this upwards climb is progress, away from death and towards life. While he lived the last twenty-one years of his life in exile, eating the bread of strangers, he wrote one of the great poems of world literature.  They might not have been the stairs of his own home, but nonetheless Dante continued stepping up and down them, literally and metaphorically, for which we should be grateful.  His poetry supports the claim that the quill is mightier than the sword, for he slew his enemies with his terza rima verses.

Heaven might remain beyond the horizon, but we can decide, like Ulysses, “to sail beyond the sunset”. Hell, by contrast, is perpetual stasis.