Reading Dante

I haven't abandoned the nominal project of this blog. But I've been sidetracked.

Lately, I've been reading Dante's Inferno. This isn't the first time for me. I tackled it once, back in High School. It was lost upon me. I tried again in college, taking an entire course devoted to this text. I gained a better appreciation for it's surface. How is Hell structured? What is the cosmology? The soteriology?

But, to be honest, meaning was lost upon me. The text was occasionally useful, but never meaningful.

A few weeks ago (Bloomsday to be precise) I was in New York, thinking of the Inferno. I was shocked by its opening line, as though I'd never read it before: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita..." As Mandelbaum puts it, "When I had journeyed half of our life's way."

And there, in the first Canto, plain as the day, was a description of the very agony I had undergone last September... the crucial moment of inner failure that drove me back into the arms of the Church.

Suddenly, this wasn't a dry discourse of medieval soteriology. It was a confession delivered from beyond a space in which I too had been trapped. Is it a roadmap?

I wondered: Is the infernal journey retraceable? Is this route available to me? Over the last two weeks, I've devoured the Inferno... by now I believe I've read each canto at least three times... poring over it. Though I've long been aware of the text, the experience has been one of disclosure - as though it had suddenly chosen to unveil itself before me. This wasn't the sadistic homiletic I'd taken it for. It was imbued with a pathos and humanism I'd never seen before... been too dense to appreciate.

Though it's mistake to describe the Inferno, and the punishments it so lavishly details, as a mere metaphor... it's also a mistake to displace their significance into a distant afterlife. The Dantean cosmology is very much a thing of this world. If the punishments it describes are brutal (and they are), they are no less real... true of us, existing in this world. As Virgil describes the damned, they are "the miserable people, those who have lost the good of the intellect." And who has not been trapped in the cramped confines of one's own weakness?

At first, I thought perhaps it was an invitation for exospection - a frank examination of the failures I've seen... acts of violence to which I've witnessed, acts of betrayal to which I've been subjected. The more I reflect upon it, however, the more I realize that it's a road-map for introspection... a frank analysis of my own failures. An invitation to recognize and abhor my own sins of incomprehension. The only route towards the Purgatorial mountain is inwards and downwards, through the Hell of one's own irredeemable mistakes.

I might not belabor this topic in this space... but I've nevertheless broken the structure of Hell into the following 34 questions:

1. The neutrals – When have I not taken a side that I surely should have taken? When have I sinned through non-commitment?
   
2. The ignorant – When have I been diminished by my failure to understand?
   
3. The lustful – When have I suffered from the pangs of lust?
   
4. The gluttonous – When have I suffered from appetite?
   
5. The avaricious – When have I suffered from the incontinent urge to hoard?
   
6. the prodigal – When have I suffered from the incontinent urge to waste?
   
7. The wrathful – When have I truly and spontaneously been angry?
   
8. the sullen – When have I truly and spontaneously been despondent?
   
9. Heretics – When have I believed against better judgment?
   
10. Tyrants – When have I abused my power in an effort to destroy another?
    
11. Murderers – When have I angrily sought to destroy another?
    
12. Suicides – When have I violently attempted to destroy myself?
    
13. Squanderers – When have I violently wasted that which was valuable?
    
14. Blasphemers – When have I cursed the world for my own fault?
    
15. Sodomites – When have I satiated a desire I knew to be disordered?
    
16. Usurers – When have I given out of a desire for gain?
    
17. Panders – When have I volunteered the charity of another for my own gain?
    
18. Seducers – When have I taken from another under false pretenses?
    
19. Flatterers – When have I stoked another’s ego to hide my own advantage?
    
20. Simonists – When have I abused my authority for my own gain?
    
21. Diviners, astrologers, magicians – When have I sought unearned and unwarranted knowledge without experience?
    
22. Barrators (graft) – When have I abused a position of trust for my own benefit?
    
23. Hypocrites – When have I presented myself as the opposite of what I am?
    
24. Thieves – When have I stolen from another what I knew to be his?
    
25. Fraudulent Counselors – When have I given bad advice for my own benefit?
    
26. Sowers of Scandal & Schism – When have I sought to make trouble between others for its own sake or for my own profit?
    
27. Falsifiers of metals (nature) – When have I obscured the truth of the world?
    
28. Falsifiers of Persons – When have I obscured the truth of my identity?
    
29. Falsifiers of Coins – When have I abused another's faith in an institution?
    
30. Falsifiers of Words – When have I abused another's faith in my self?
    
31. Traitors to Kin – When have I betrayed my family?
    
32. Traitors to Homeland or Party – When have I betrayed my nation?
    
33. Traitors to Guests – When have I betrayed one who trusted my hospitality?
    
34. Traitors to Benefactors – When have I betrayed one who was generous to me?
    
    

These are the questions... not who's damned and who isn't. The categories of damnation and purgation are redundant. They're circumstantial, not essential. Damnation is failure to proceed beyond and through the awareness and rejection of one's sinful nature. It's more than a metaphor, but it's far from a literalism.