Dante, Virgil, Eliot
By PATRICK J. WALSH
Last fall marked the seven-hundred-year anniversary of the death of Dante. Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) was one of the greatest poets of all time. His Divine Comedy is a classic of world literature.
Recently on the hemicycle staircase at the MFA Boston, I encountered a compelling statue of Dante and Virgil, which stirred to memory a line from the Divine Comedy. Entertaining my own muse, I said aloud: “What, are you here?” That line is from the Inferno, where Dante expresses surprise upon seeing his favorite teacher, Brunetto Latini, in Hell. T.S. Eliot used the same line in Little Gidding, one of the Four Quartets.
Entitled, Dante and Virgil, the 1861 bronze by Baron Henri de Triqueti (1803-1874) depicts Dante holding a scroll inscribed with a line from Canto One of Purgatory: “Liberta va cercando ch’e si cara.” (He goes seeking freedom which is so dear.) Inhabitants of the USA are now more concerned with conforming to the dictates of the Mass Media Inc.
Virgil represents the high mark of pagan civilization. It is well to remember that Christ was born into Roman Empire and our fallen nature took on a new meaning from this intersection of the timeless with time.
This statue was created in the mid-nineteenth century when Dante was undergoing a revival. The great poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a language professor at Harvard translated The Divine Comedy into verse. His friend Charles Eliot Norton made a prose translation as a renewed interest in the study of Dante took place at the university.
Eliot, who attended Harvard at the beginning of the twentieth century, treasured Dante. It is likely he saw this statue of Dante and Virgil on exhibit at the MFA Boston.
Stairs are often mentioned in Eliot’s poetry, symbolizing a spiritual journey, where one purifies oneself by ascending to a higher spiritual level. All his life Eliot struggled on purgatorial stairs in search of a divine vision — “The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.”
Dante became a continual source of inspiration for Eliot on his journey through time. He often quotes and paraphrases Dante throughout his poetry. Eliot’s friend, Conrad Aiken, observed that Eliot carried Dante in his pocket while composing The Waste Land. Dante was as essential to Eliot as a guide, as Virgil was to Dante.
Midway in the journey of life, Dante found himself spiritually lost in a dark wood. His lifelong love and muse, Beatrice, now residing in Paradise, sends the Roman poet Virgil to guide Dante to the right path of virtue.
The Divine Comedy is based on a visionary experience Dante had during Holy Week of 1300. The poet had an “excesses mentis” — the passing of consciousness beyond thought which mystics had spoken of. It left him with an overwhelming memory of the Trinity, the number three, and the still unexplained mystery of light. Dante woke believing he had been on an actual journey from Hell to Heaven.
His journey with his companion the great Latin poet Virgil through Hell and Purgatory is the main action of the Divine Comedy. The poem is called a comedy, not a tragedy because Christians, unlike the Greeks or the Romans, believe that human existence is not tragic, but is a meaningful journey toward a loving God.
People today often say, “We’re all on a journey,” but never indicate where the journey starts or where it ends. Dante believed our journey to be one from time to the eternal. Unlike our age, his age believed the supernatural to be the greater reality. For Dante and Roman Catholic Europe, the supernatural was the origin and end of human existence.
Like Dante, T.S. Eliot also found himself spiritually lost in a dark wood, the dreary world of modernity which Eliot called a waste land. Eliot deemed life to be meaningless without the supernatural.
Our age is not one of poetic vision or of faith. We believe in the scientific method and our faith lies in the belief that all the ills and pains that have afflicted mankind throughout history will soon fall before an advancing science — every tear will be wiped away.
Have a look sometime at the strange self-help gurus at PBS programs like Aging Backwards, Brain Revolution, and others. They advocate pop scientism and psychology where the human person is reduced to a machine that can be fine-tuned like a used car.
On PBS the reality of suffering and the sadness of human existence known to all men and civilizations of high culture is ignored in favor of indulging in the lowest standard of mass civilization. The end of life for the bourgeois producers and viewers of PBS is one of comfortable self-preservation. They are the closed souls Bergson warned of.
The ancients were open to the whole of life and openness to the highest good — God.
They knew that human consciousness is not the result of a biochemical accident but a gift from God. All the world’s art and literature is an attempt to trace God’s face reflected on the water.
And all the world’s great religions – Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam — hold that man will be judged after death. Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the people.
But the real opiate of the people is the belief that we are not held accountable for our actions and that there is no judgment and no life after death.
Lyndall Gordon in Eliot’s Early Years wrote: “This notion of pilgrimage from imperfection to perfection was deeply rooted in Eliot’s family and their Puritan past. For him to experience the world as a waste land was a prerequisite to experiencing it in faith.”
In his poetry Eliot reminds modern man of his Christian roots and the cultural legacy of Europe which achieved its highest expression in Dante. T.S. Eliot’s Clark Lectures analyzing “the disintegration of the intellect in modern Europe” pointed out that in the fourteenth century because of the harmony between philosophy, theology, and poetry, “the human spirit reached a greater sum of range, intensity, and completeness of emotion than it has ever attained before or since.”
Tragic And Tearful
Viewing this MFA statue of the saturnine, meditative Dante and the supportive, tender, almost feminine Virgil, I am aware that there is a communion of poets as well as a communion of saints who transcend the dimension of time. Both poets are crowned with laurels. During his life Dante, an exile the city of his birth, was crowned with something more akin to a crown of thorns.
Virgil, Dante, and Eliot believed that our universe is an ordered cosmos not a disordered chaos of a theoretical big bang.
Virgil led Dante through Hell and Purgatory. Virgil the pagan poet was believed to have anticipated Christ’s coming. In late antiquity Christians believed Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue was a prophetic prediction of the birth of Christ.
In the Aeneid, Virgil reached the apex of pagan civilization by realizing that “Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.” (All things have their tears.) Virgil saw the truth of human existence as being tragic and tearful.
For Virgil the Roman pursuit of virtue and fame did not satisfy the soul. Neither did the philosophy of stoicism which became popular in the later Roman Empire. Virgil’s poetry is the pagan world’s cry for human redemption.
Our Savior’s Agony of Tears in the Garden was the start of the redemptive washing of mankind from sin and a movement of hope above this earthly valley of tears.
As Romans Catholics we should look at the world for what it is and look beyond it for consolation.
“We are all on a journey”. . . It’s a hard climb. As the great English writer and critic Hugh Kingsmill put it:
“Life exists on different levels of consciousness and the journey from the lowest to the highest level must be undertaken alone. The state of being symbolized in, ‘when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,’ is far distant from us in this life and the herd bellowing on the plain below may send up a warming and comforting sound to the climber tiring on the first slopes of a long ascent. But the communion of scops is not the communion of saints and if the climber turns back let him at least retain his sense of distinction between them.”
(Patrick J. Walsh has had articles published in The Wall Street Journal, Chronicles of Culture, Modern Age, and Crisis.)