04/10/2007
The Only Way Up is Down: Rachel Jacoff on Dante's Inferno
The Only Way Up is Down: Rachel Jacoff on Dante's Inferno The world of Dante scholars is a small and close-knit one, and Rachel Jacoff is one of its leading luminaries. In this Entitled Opinions conversation, she discusses The Divine Comedy, and more particularly The Inferno, with her former student, our Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison, himself a major Dante scholar. They begin with […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The fragments with which Ezra Pound's can't those break off into silence contain a heart-winding confession of failure.
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"Mamur, ma moo, what do I love and where are you that I lost my center fighting the world?"
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The dreams clash and are shattered and that I tried to make a padaizo tadaeste.
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I have tried to write paradise.
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Do not move.
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Let the wind speak that is paradise.
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Let the gods forgive what I have made. Let those I love try to forgive what I have made.
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I forgive you Ezra.
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It's not that Dante was a better poet than you.
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It's the world you lost your center fighting against.
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What made you think you could write paradise in such an age, an age without center, with no view onto the stars?
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[ Music ]
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Welcome back, friends, to this special edition of entitled opinions.
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This is a third segment of our three-part sequence on Dante's Divine Comedy, with Professor Rachel Jacob from Wellesley College.
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Until now, we have been talking with her about the Euferno, and today we're going to move on to Purgatory and Paradise.
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Despite a few subsequent glimpses or intimations here and there, Dante's padaizo is in effect,
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the last full-bodied vision of Paradise in Western literature.
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It's all been either hell or paradise lost since then.
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Pound tried to write paradise in the 20th century, but Pound was not a fully sane individual.
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Purgatory may be, but Paradise is a near impossible proposition these days.
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Troy, Jilomor, a guest of entitled opinions, by the way, and winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.
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Got it just about right in his poem, Tom Thompson in situ, where he describes Tom's living quarters in Purgatory.
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He likes it here, from balcony, he can see his favorite deli, second favorite bar,
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and in the distance on a bright clear day the gates of hell, if he squints through scope.
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Those infamous inscriptions coalesce, abandon all hope ye who enter here, and absolutely no outside food or drink.
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And what of heaven must it too not be same distance opposite direction?
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But his view don't face that way. That's speculation.
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That's about a succinct characterization of the age we're going to find.
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Our view don't face that way.
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But that doesn't prevent us from speculating with Dante, whose view did face that way.
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What did he see and how did he describe it for us, this thing we call Paradise?
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No one better to ask than my guest, Rachel Jacobs, who is putting the finishing touches on a book about Dante's pet adisale.
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Rachel, welcome to the program yet again.
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It's a wonderful to be here yet again and to think that we actually made it out of the inferno.
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We did. In fact, that was at the end of our last segment, we finally got out of there, and in the next hour, I'm hoping that we can move somewhat quickly through Purgatory,
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and then speculate with Dante about Paradise.
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So the first question, what changes when we move from the affair to the Purgatory?
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Well, it's very striking, isn't it, in the opening sequence of the Purgatory, that we are back in a world of light.
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We're back in a world of sunshine. It's in the moments before dawn, the early morning star, Venus is shining.
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And it's the sign that we're back in a world where life and everything comes back to life.
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It's a very resirectional moment that we feel at the beginning of the Purgatory.
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Dante says that wonderful line you quoted in your first monologue, let poetry rise from the dead.
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So there is a strong sense of rebirth.
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It is, after all, time to coincide with Easter Sunday morning.
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And the return of sunshine will also mean the return of time back into the consciousness of the poem,
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because Dante is forever telling time all throughout the Purgatory, all in terms of where the sun is,
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and not only where the sun is in Purgatory, but where it is at various cardinal points on Earth.
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So we're in a funny sense reunited with the Earth, I think, also in the Purgatory.
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In many ways, it's my favorite, "Canticle of the Three" because precisely it's that mid-point between two eternities,
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the eternity of hell and the eternity of Paradise, and it's very earthly, it's temporal, it's finite.
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Even the journey through Purgatory for the penitence is a finite process.
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And it's also the part of the poem in which hope really means something here.
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They're all hoping for something and it's actually going to take place.
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Because by definition, if you make it to Purgatory, you are going to be saved.
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It may take some centuries, but you're going to get there.
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So that puts it in a very different psychic space than either Paddizo or Inferno.
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And also, I think there's that doubleness, particularly at the beginning of the Purgatory, of this kind of tender and nostalgic relationship towards Earthly life.
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At the same time that all of the penitence are learning to go beyond that,
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kind of give that up in hopes of the future that lies ahead.
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So there's always that doubleness of looking backwards and looking forwards.
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Last time you mentioned that all of the sins in Inferno are have social, political or civic consequences,
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and that what we have in the Inferno City, where the relationship between neighbors is cannibalistic in the extreme is cannibalistic rather than community-based.
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And right off the bat in Purgatory, it's signaled that we are now in a realm where the group,
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the community friendship and things are prevail over the isolation of the sinner.
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Yeah, the notion of the centrality of friendship throughout the Purgatory, I think, is signaled in that very first one-on-one encounter with Kazela.
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Kazela being Dante's friend who presumably had sung some of Dante's poems to music.
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What's interesting about that encounter, I think it's in Purgatory 2, I believe.
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It's based on another classical motif, which again, last time I cited the leaves,
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that starts with Homer, taken over by Virgil and then Dante.
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And here Homer has the famous failed embrace of his mother, Antichlea, in the underworld.
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Virgil has the failed embrace with his father.
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And he is his father.
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And he is his father. And Kazela's book Six of the Annead.
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And again, Dante gives that twist that it's now the embrace. It's a failed embrace of the friend.
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Failed means that their ghosts, they don't have substance, bodily substance.
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And therefore you try to wrap your arms around them and you find that they're made of air.
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But isn't it interesting that for Dante it's the friend? And not only that, if you read it carefully,
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you'll see that Dante reaches out to embrace Kazela before he actually recognizes it.
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Yes. Because he's so star for human affection.
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And it's so beautiful because in the other two failed embraces that is in Homer and Virgil,
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of course, their moments for tears, here what happens? There's a smile.
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There's a smile, yeah.
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And it's the first of many smiles in purgatory.
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So this event, which is such a source of sorrow in the classical epics, is turned around here.
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It isn't going to matter. I mean, they're as Kazela says, as I loved you earlier, I love you down.
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So there is the continuity of earthly affection as well as the separation from Earth.
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But I think that turn around, we'll talk about that maybe later when we get to purgatory 30.
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But that sort of way that things that are tragic in the classical world can be made at part of Dante's comedy is quite extraordinary.
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Where else do you see the motif of friendship in this tactical?
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Well, certainly all over the many friends, actual friends that Dante meets with or talks about.
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But I think maybe most acutely one would think about it in terms of that sequence of cantos where Dante meets with various poets,
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some of whom literally were either his friends or people he knew like Fodez de Dronati, with whom there's a tremendous kind of epic of friendship in their encounter.
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But also even in the whole story of Stasius and Stasius in Virgil, and the wonderful notion that Stasius, who we know, was a great lover of Virgil, Stasius, who lends his own poem.
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Can you tell our listeners who was Stasius?
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Yeah, Stasius was a first century silver latin poet who wrote, among other things, an epic cult of the Bayad, that ends with an homage to Virgil,
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which he says to his own poem, "Follow in the footsteps of the Divine Anean."
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And Dante must have read that and thought about that.
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So Dante can try the marvelous episode where Stasius, who turns out to be the only person in purgatory that we actually see getting released from his
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his fergation moving on, having achieved what he had to, the one person who's in change, Stasius and Cathers.He and Virgil, and gives this great speech about the importance of Virgil as his mother and his nurse, and the aneanid as that which inspired his own work.
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He gives this speech in front of Virgil without knowing yet that he's doing that. And Virgil gets to hear this incredible--
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Without knowing that it's Virgil.
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That it's Virgil in front of him. And Virgil gets to hear this great homage, which is a wonderful moment, an homage that we all know is somehow Dante telling Virgil, "Look, your poem was the sparks and the seed of my poem," as it was of Stasius.
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Anyway, this episode goes on and it turns out that Stasius owes after he finds out that it's Virgil.
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He owes to Virgil not only he thinks his poetic abilities, but also his moral change from being someone who was a prodigal by reading Virgil by reading the aneanid by-- as it turns out, misreading the aneanid bed.
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He was converted away from the sin which would have kept him in inferno. But most importantly and most magically, it turns out that Stasius believes himself to have become a Christian by Virgil of reading Virgil's fourth eclog.
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Now, there's no evidence that we can find and people certainly have been looking for it that Stasius had a conversion.
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But in the Dante version of this story, he did have a conversion, but he was a secret or closet Christian. He didn't come forth with this, so that's possibly why history does not record it.
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Anyway, it's a wonderful story because it's a story that allows Virgil this absolute centrality in all aspects of Stasius's life.
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And how can you give anyone more than that?
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You give him his poetic vocation and you give him his salvation.
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Of course, but it's also of course the height of Virgilian pathos, that's the ethos that's been in the bomb since the first cantor of the inferno, because Virgil who facilitates Dante's journey, who facilitated Stasius's conversion is himself not saved and cannot be saved.
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So that opens up that whole problematic over and over again in the poem, where as other people have said, "Bridiantly, I think Virgil is the tragedy in the comedy. Virgil's fate is the thing that haunts the comedy in some way."
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But wouldn't you say that Dante was a very perceptive reader of the Inyid, and that he accessed all the pathos that's in Virgil's poem and understood Virgil to be someone who was full of a certain kind of sorrow, or we would might call melancholy in modern terms, who in a sense was in desperate need of Christian salvation without even knowing,
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Yes, I'd have hoped without even having been the beneficiary of any revelation as such.
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So the condition of Virgil in the afterlife in limbo as someone who lives in desire without hope, one could say that maybe how Dante saw the condition of Virgil in life.
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Exactly.
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And that's not a sin, you don't get punished for that as a sin, but it's a condition which is from a Christian point of view of failure.
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That's why it's... well, you can say that it's tragic for Virgil to be condemned to limbo, but if you go and read the description of the limbo where he is, it's exactly based on the elitian fields of the Inyid, and that's the best place you could be in the afterlife as the Romans conceived it in Virgil's time.
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Therefore, in a sense you can say that Dante is giving Virgil the most he could have envisioned for himself at that time, and the tragedy is that he was born too soon, or however you want to look at it.
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The tragedy is that he had a desire without hope, without really actually realizing it.
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Yes.
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But it's true that the more he goes into this archetypically Christian realm of purgatory, the more his exile from this era as well as Rome is accentuated.
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And Dante allows, of course, Virgil to go right up to that moment.
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He enters the earthly paradise, he's standing at the river, and then he disappears.
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And it's always kind of magical to me that we have known since Inferno 1 that Virgil is not going the whole way on the journey, and we've known several times in the purgatory, it's been reminded of this fact that Virgil can't go the whole way, Virgil has a kind of farewell speech before they enter the earthly paradise, and yet at the moment that Virgil actually disappears the poem, it's always a shock.
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It just takes your breath away.
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There's no more pathos, I think, in the whole poem than that.
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That's the point.
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Would you like to reconstruct it for readers who don't have it present to mine?
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Yes.
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Well, Dante and Virgil enter the earthly paradise.
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There's a kind of ceremonial, extraordinary procession that is taking place that they witness, a procession which really represents all of the books of the Bible as if they were their authors or they presumed authors.
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And at the end of this group of texts that are walking suddenly there appears this chariot, like a Roman triumphal chariot, and on that chariot is going to be Beatrice who's still veiled, not seavel, and surrounded by angels.
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So that in purgatory 30, we begin that canto with this moment where the procession stops.
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It's going to be the presentation of Beatrice, the whole poem has been looking forward to this moment, and it takes place really in a sequence of Virgilian illusions.
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The first of which comes when the angels who surround Beatrice are speaking Virgilian Latin and a site of a line from Books of the Anean,
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Dante, Omani, was Lilya, playing as Giv, Lilyis with full hands. This is a line that refers to a few nearl tragic moment in the Aneanid, talking about the death of Augustus' nephew and Cisis, and he is his father when he's of the tragic death of this young man.
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So let me give Lilyis with full hands, even though this gesture be in on us, in vain. So again, it's a tragic moment in the Aneanid that's converted here, these are the lilies of the resurrection and not tragic, funeral Lilyis.
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Later in the sequence, Dante turns to Virgil to say in the presence of Beatrice that he feels the marks of ancient love and the signs of ancient love, he does that in a line in Italian that translates literally in the past.
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This lays literally a line from the Aneanid when Anna, Diodes, sister, is hearing from Diodo that she has fallen in love with Aneanis and she says I feel the marks of the ancient flame.
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Diodo who will end up in flames, tragically in the Aneanid, hear again in a completely different context, really turned upside down by Dante.
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And then, ultimately, that is the moment where when Dante turns to, speak to Virgil, Virgil suddenly is God.
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And then Dante mourns that immediately, and the name of Virgil keeps coming back over and over again in these lines, it appears five times within five lines.
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In three of those times, he talks addressing the name of Virgil in this kind of funeral way. Virgil had left us bereft of himself, Virgil, and so forth, and people have recognized that as an illusion to the moment.
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The fourth Georgia, when Orpheus, has lost finally his beloved Uritichi and repeats her name three times, exactly in the same place in the line, so to speak.
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So this is extraordinary fade out of the Virgil voice from a literal quotation to a translation to an illusion, and then, Virgil steps in with her first word, which is Dante.
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The one and only time his name is mentioned in the poem, and then she lets them have it.
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So we've been waiting around for this beautiful woman to appear who was going to save him, and she shows up as Dante says, "Like an Admiral."
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And he gets a very good dose of what Peter Hawkins calls "Tough Love."
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Yeah, he has to repent for his sins there. He has to weep. Yeah, yes to go.
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But it's an extraordinary moment because though we've been anticipating it, it happens in a way that was all unexpected, both the way she arrives and the way he disappears.
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It's full of pathos. The other motif, we're talking about friendship, the disappearance of Virgil, Stasis.
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Purgatory is full of poets as well. It's very much the catechol of the imagination.
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There are a lot of debts to predecessors that Dante is acknowledging not only Virgil, but still Novus and Guilogu, and so forth.
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How do you see the role of poetry or the way that the poem reflects upon the creative act of making images?
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Well, so much more explicitly it does that. It doesn't, in the Purgatory, as opposed to either there are poets in Inferno, and there is only really one, I think, professional poet.
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And the pedadizon is Fokodimarset, and he stops being a poet. So, Purgatory is really the realm of poetry, but think of the music of the whole invocation of art and artists in the terrace of pride.
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The visual arts as well. Yes, exactly.
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So, I think there's one of the things you might say the Purgatory explores is the possibility of the relationship between the arts and salvation.
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I mean, what is the relationship between the aesthetic and the spiritual?
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And the arts are given a major role in different ways on the terraces of Purgatory through the lives of the various poets we meet.
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But it's not a one-on-one correspondence at all, so I think Dante is exploring the possibilities of art to relate to the salvation, to issues of man salvation.
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Would you agree that the divine comedy would not be such a powerful poem if it actually conforms to the rather standard orthodox view of the exemplary function of the
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exemplary function of art. On various terraces he sees artworks, visual or otherwise, that serve as examples exemplar, which would be called in life, of virtue or to be king, to be imitated or vice to be avoided.
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Dante's poem is not reducible to this kind of exemplarity. Would you agree with that?
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I wouldn't. I think it's a wonderful way that the poem in a sense contains that aesthetic model. You see what it's like, the simplistic nature in a way of art simply as exemplar.
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Because it's contained within a poem where nothing is simple, where there's a much more complex relationship.
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So even the poets that Dante is paying tribute to here and that he's paying filial tribute to.
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There are also people who are undergoing purgation having not been perfect models. And whose artwork too is in some sense implicated in needing to be dealt with in this retroactive retrospective way.
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So he refuses the simplistic, let's say, not only in the ways that we talked about in the Inferno by making the sinners such fascinating and complex people, but also by making the safe people complex as well.
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It's really like a different poem. I've had this experience when I teach the whole thing that you learn how to read the Inferno according to its own sort of internal rules of reading.
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And then when you turn to Poulgatorio, they no longer apply. There's no longer this irony.
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Irony is what disappears. Irony disappears. There's no longer the hermeneutics of suspicion, which is necessary if you're not going to be taken in by the deceptive or self deceptive self serving, so the quiz of sinners and so forth.
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So it's almost like a whole new aesthetic game that's under for it.
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I think that's true also in the pedadizo, that each of the gantacles has its own poetics. And you have to sort of learn again how to read.
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Obviously each of them connects up with the others. There are all kinds of cross references, illusions, structural connections, but there's a different poetics each of the gantacles.
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You can't just apply a method of reading to, and that most great literature is like that.
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Every great book requires a sweet generous kind of learning experience about how to read it on its own terms.
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If we go, move down to the pedadizo because I know that this gantacle is particularly dear to you, you know.
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Students who will go from the fed into purgatory will actually find purgatory very appealing.
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Much more difficult when it comes to pedadizo to show what the intensity of this gantacle is all about for especially modern readers who find this heavy overlay of theology.
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And a scholastic speculation in many cases that wears all the drama, where's the human dimension?
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Well, two questions. One, what do you do as a teacher of the poem to enable your students to get into this gantacle, but at the end of the video?
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And the second question would then be what is the fascination of it for you?
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I think, you know, we talked about teachers the first time we talked in. I was very lucky because my first teachers were people who loved the paradeso.
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Dr. Mazzayo, who was my very first teacher, he just finished writing a book on the paradeso when I met him.
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So I think that I was given access to this gantacle, and then again by John Fratero, who was writing marvelously on the paradeso at the point that I was studying with him.
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So, but I think that all of the people who end up loving the paradeso end up understanding that in some way this is the really great daring poetic achievement of the poem.
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It's not that it's the most fascinating in terms of character or incident or narrative, but it's the greatest challenge that the poet takes on.
|
| 00:26:14.820 |
And of course he announces this in that totally remarkable that I think unique address to the reader. You know how addresses to the reader always invitations to read. Dante starts the paradeso in Paradeso 2 by telling the reader he's probably not up to it.
|
| 00:26:29.820 |
All you who are falling behind me perhaps you should go home again.
|
| 00:26:32.820 |
Turn around.
|
| 00:26:33.820 |
I don't think there's another one like that in the whole of literature.
|
| 00:26:37.820 |
I think close to it is Star Trek. It's that opening motif about to go where no one has gone before to explore strange new worlds and to go where no one has gone before.
|
| 00:26:49.820 |
Yeah. And of course that is the Ulyssian impulse that Godry had just put an ale in in Ferto 26 that he's sort of an axe.
|
| 00:26:57.820 |
And then he's you know he's Ulysses he's Jason after the Golden fleece all those great classical figures come back in this enterprise in which he's also Saint Paul.
|
| 00:27:07.820 |
He's full of illusion to Saint Paul being wrapped to third heaven but of course Paul makes it very clear that this is something that cannot be spoken about. And Dante is going to speak about it.
|
| 00:27:17.820 |
And what is the fundamental impossibility of the paradeso?
|
| 00:27:21.820 |
Representing the unrepresentable. I mean because you are beyond ultimately you're going to go beyond time and space into the world of the empirean in which no natural laws apply you're beyond nature.
|
| 00:27:35.820 |
And it's very interesting course in the structure since each part of Dante's poem that can each article has 33 can'tos plus as we said 34 in the Inferno.
|
| 00:27:46.820 |
Dante's got to keep this going for 33 can'tos. There's sometimes I used to think well maybe the paradeso should have just all of that journey should have taken place in an instant or micro instant and then dragged out over the three three
|
| 00:28:00.820 |
but he does have to keep the temporality going. Now it's interesting that even though there's endless time telling as we've said in the purgatory in the pattadeso I believe there's only one timer for it's in the whole of the parody so we know that he spent six hours in the in the circle of Gemini in the constellation Gemini.
|
| 00:28:18.820 |
I think that's the only time that you know how long he's anywhere. So there is a way in which time again starts getting erased.
|
| 00:28:26.820 |
So aside can you remind me when he encounters Adam and he he wants to determine how long Adam and Eve spent in the Garden of Eden.
|
| 00:28:35.820 |
They spent also six hours. Six hours is very crucial. Yeah. And of course again for people coming from Milton that's just astonishing that they only got to spend six hours in Eden.
|
| 00:28:46.820 |
And Dante all the important choices are made right away you know as in the fallen angels and so forth. They're either made right away or the important choices are made at the last minute as in the case of all those people who are saved at the last minute.
|
| 00:29:00.820 |
So the fundamental unrepresentability of this realm of the Christian celestial paradise. He needs to find poetically the objective correlative representation.
|
| 00:29:15.820 |
And one of the main ones is of course the heavenly spheres. Yeah. So that Dante structures the parodiesos so that up until can't go 30. He's actually traversing what is still the material universe there the heavens but they're understood to be material heavens.
|
| 00:29:33.820 |
And in the 30th canto he crosses over a river a river of light in which he bathes his eyes and supposedly from that point on all fictions representations and so forth are gone because he's beyond those things.
|
| 00:29:48.820 |
But of course it's a poem so he can never be beyond those things language still implicates him in metaphor in image and all of those things. So the great challenge of particularly the last candles is how to represent that when you are theorizing that you're beyond that.
|
| 00:30:07.820 |
And that's quite extraordinary. And in all the spheres he encounters saved souls or saints we would call them who make a faint appearance but it's made clear that these are not they're not being seen as they truly are.
|
| 00:30:26.820 |
They are making a condescension to his limited faculties and therefore appear to him as well as points of light.
|
| 00:30:37.820 |
Yes for the most part only in the very first circle the circle of the moon he sees the faint outlines of the human form of someone he actually knew because dido nati which at first he thinks remember our reflections because they're so faint then gradually very soon after that the human form just disappears.
|
| 00:30:55.820 |
And the souls are points of light who then start appearing as of candor d'inn in these formations or constellations so they come as signs of various kinds.
|
| 00:31:06.820 |
Could you give some examples?
|
| 00:31:08.820 |
So they first show up as circles. They garland d'antime beres who are in the circle of the sun the first time this happens. There's a circle around d'antime beres.
|
| 00:31:19.820 |
The theologians who are the satmienti the wise people 11 of them are theologians and one of them is King Solomon interestingly and then there's another circle outside of that circle again 11 theologians and then a biblical figure the prophet Nathan and there's an almost third circle that d'antime glimpses but doesn't really see.
|
| 00:31:42.820 |
So you have that sequence in the sun in Mars there's a cross formed by the various souls among whom cosmic cross great galactic cross in the sky and on the red ground of the planet a white cross on the red ground of the planet Mars.
|
| 00:32:00.820 |
Then there's the latter in Jupiter with the souls ascending and descending and then when Dante enters his native when he gets beyond the planetary spheres he enters.
|
| 00:32:13.820 |
I'm sorry in Jupiter it's that's the latter in Saturn the Jupiter the souls form an eagle and eagle yes yeah of course and then representing justice and empire.
|
| 00:32:24.820 |
And then after the latter then he's into what's called the circle of the fixed stars and he enters his naval constellation Gemini there.
|
| 00:32:34.820 |
Then he goes from there into the crystal line heaven in which he sees the angels represented as these circles circling figures around an infinite has only small and bright point of light a sort of proto vision of the end and then he's in the empire.
|
| 00:32:49.820 |
What is the empire. It is a heaven as Dante says a pure light and love.
|
| 00:32:57.820 |
Now Dante's language for the empire is extraordinary beautiful musical floral there is the great image of the white rose that the souls all are gathered in an amphitheater.
|
| 00:33:09.820 |
The souls which as we said are appearing as either faint images or points of light when Dante crosses over to that river he sees them as they will be at the end of time after the last judgment namely in their glorified bodies which is just an extraordinary.
|
| 00:33:29.820 |
I mean he can't describe it though.
|
| 00:33:31.820 |
We know they're there in there. Bianca stole it they're white stoves. So the resurrection which is very important very thankful to Dante actually.
|
| 00:33:41.820 |
I mean I never I don't want to get us off track but I never quite understood why in I guess it's part of diesel 14 in the resurrection can't do there.
|
| 00:33:54.820 |
These souls these saints are looking forward with great eagerness and desire for their resurrected flesh at the end of time and yet it's the suggestion is that they don't have to wait till the end of time they already have it somehow.
|
| 00:34:08.820 |
Well you know they can't have it. They can't be in their glorified body.
|
| 00:34:12.820 |
So you know Dante has at the end he not only has a vision of God which is enough but you know he has a vision of the souls is they're going to be at the end of time which is really extraordinary and amazing.
|
| 00:34:24.820 |
You know you were saying about how hard it is to represent the celestial paradise perhaps some of our listeners will know this very famous for Angelica painting of the last judgment on which you see on the left of the viewer's side this beautiful garden it's an image that we see a lot with the souls circling and around
|
| 00:34:41.820 |
and that seems to be heaven but if you look at that painting very closely off on the far left there's a very almost invisible kind of white gate and some gold rays shining through it and you know that's the real thing out there and he can't paint it.
|
| 00:34:57.820 |
So I think that's a good image for you know the inability to get to that celestial in my real moment.
|
| 00:35:04.820 |
And I think that anthropologically this is fascinating with all sorts of cultural consequences that in the Hebrew scriptures there are no mentions of paradise.
|
| 00:35:17.820 |
In the Christian scriptures there's only very very vague fragmentary things about the kingdom of heaven but no real descriptions.
|
| 00:35:27.820 |
The Quran on the other hand identifies paradise as the Garden of Eden and is full of descriptions of the rewards many of them material or you know the pleasures and so forth.
|
| 00:35:41.820 |
But in Christianity the fact that paradise does not have a definition that it's neither we one doesn't know where it is is it inside the heart is it a spiritual thing is it beyond the space time continuum.
|
| 00:35:57.820 |
It's part of the fabric of the visible universe or beyond and so forth makes it all very vague and almost a place that you can never reach and even to the very end we want to talk about the last kind of but at these are things that Dante continues to be projected towards something that's always a little bit out of reach in the mode of desire.
|
| 00:36:24.820 |
And also because even in those last candles there has to constantly be from poetic point of view deferral you can't you can't arise until the last lines.
|
| 00:36:33.820 |
And then when you do arrive you're out of it already I mean what happens in the end of the poem seems to me to happen in between the last lines.
|
| 00:36:41.820 |
And instead of adverbs about it already had happened and where did it happen in between in between.
|
| 00:36:47.820 |
Let's talk let's talk about the last contour and then I'd like to backtrack a little bit talk about the politics of but since we're already there.
|
| 00:36:56.820 |
This is the anti-gunup be higher he's gotten now to the to the very end Beatrice has guided him up through the celestial spheres and now hands him over to St Bernard who is going to lead him to the just that last stage.
|
| 00:37:18.820 |
And it's through an appeal to the Virgin Mary.
|
| 00:37:24.820 |
To intercede on Dante's behalf with God so that he may have this vision which will be the consummation his entire journey.
|
| 00:37:32.820 |
And count to 33 of the pettides will begin with this extraordinary prayer to the Virgin.
|
| 00:37:40.820 |
By St Bernard I actually had a show here with one of my colleagues B. Set up in Chiva on the Virgin Mary where we talked about this.
|
| 00:37:47.820 |
This prayer would you like to say something about that prayer to the Virgin and how it's emblematic of this logic of paradox.
|
| 00:37:57.820 |
I mean paradox is so built into everything in the parody so because it's so central to Christian theology and nothing more paradoxical than the opening lines of Canto 33 Virgin mother daughter of your son.
|
| 00:38:11.820 |
These are things that in the world and all of those paradoxes are just down to compress them into this extraordinarily beautiful talk about Arias.
|
| 00:38:24.820 |
This is an Aria and of course verdi said it in the photoset Betis acri.
|
| 00:38:30.820 |
So it already is an Aria in Dante.
|
| 00:38:33.820 |
And it's a prayer that both compressors all of the paradoxical issues of the incarnation and also makes much of the importance of mediation.
|
| 00:38:43.820 |
We talked in an earlier show about female mediation that Dante's journey really is inaugurated by Mary who knows what he needs even before he asks for it.
|
| 00:38:52.820 |
And that attribute in her is celebrated again.
|
| 00:38:55.820 |
Also Dante speaks of Mary I think in Canto 32.
|
| 00:38:58.820 |
She has the face that most resembles Christ.
|
| 00:39:01.820 |
So Mary is very present in this poem.
|
| 00:39:05.820 |
She's present as an exemplar all through purgatory.
|
| 00:39:08.820 |
She's present in a very real sense here at the end of the poem.
|
| 00:39:11.820 |
And I think it's in their Hans Ors von Baldis are says this is really a Marian poem,
|
| 00:39:17.820 |
rather than a Christological Bible. And I think that's true too that Mary is present in the poem in a more powerful way than Christ.
|
| 00:39:27.820 |
But in any case she is here as his axis to God actually.
|
| 00:39:32.820 |
And that's what he's looking for.
|
| 00:39:34.820 |
And in some sense the definition of heaven for Christian has to be the beatific vision.
|
| 00:39:39.820 |
And has to be that you are finally able to see God.
|
| 00:39:43.820 |
And that's what Dante's been heading for all through.
|
| 00:39:46.820 |
And that's what he has granted at the end through this extraordinary set of a very sequential vision that is he sees first,
|
| 00:39:56.820 |
he's looking into this point of light.
|
| 00:39:58.820 |
And what he sees keeps changing because his vision keeps becoming improved.
|
| 00:40:02.820 |
So he sees what when I call the God of the philosophers first,
|
| 00:40:06.820 |
the God who's the totem symbol of everything.
|
| 00:40:09.820 |
Ultimately he sees a Trinitarian figure, these three circles.
|
| 00:40:14.820 |
And then at the very end of the poem of course what he's trying to see is the mystery of the incarnation.
|
| 00:40:19.820 |
Yeah, can we go through those just one more time, one at a time.
|
| 00:40:23.820 |
So the first one is the God of how did you put it?
|
| 00:40:27.820 |
Well, one thing is the God of everything in the world that's now united,
|
| 00:40:31.820 |
bound in love and one volume, everything that is scattered.
|
| 00:40:34.820 |
The accidents that are in substances.
|
| 00:40:36.820 |
I mean the language is very philosophical right.
|
| 00:40:38.820 |
And he uses it's all bound up in this in unvolume in one volume, obviously a vision also in the poem.
|
| 00:40:45.820 |
So this extraordinary of everything coming together in this magical site.
|
| 00:40:50.820 |
And then that turns into a Trinitarian vision where Dante sees these three circling rainbow figures,
|
| 00:40:58.820 |
which are described obviously in language that suggests the Christian Trinity,
|
| 00:41:04.820 |
which knows itself and again in a Dante's moment not only knows itself and loves itself but smiles upon itself.
|
| 00:41:12.820 |
I think unique definition of the Trinity.
|
| 00:41:15.820 |
And then as he's looking into these circles what he's trying at the end to see.
|
| 00:41:20.820 |
And he says it's impossible to do.
|
| 00:41:22.820 |
It's like squaring the circle. It can't be done.
|
| 00:41:25.820 |
But he somehow manages to do it, which is to see how the human effigy,
|
| 00:41:31.820 |
the human form is fitted to the circle.
|
| 00:41:34.820 |
And what is the mystery of the incarnation?
|
| 00:41:37.820 |
And he says it can't be done.
|
| 00:41:39.820 |
But somehow it has been done.
|
| 00:41:41.820 |
But already he says I was circling.
|
| 00:41:44.820 |
So at the very end there's this moment where he is in a kind of circular motion from this experience of having finally kind of seen this perfect vision that
|
| 00:41:59.820 |
through a full duration that he can't actually describe the
|
| 00:42:00.340 |
of the circle.
|
| 00:42:01.820 |
In fact, he can't even assure the reader that it happened.
|
| 00:42:07.820 |
He can only say the only evidence I have for it having happened is that when I think about it I have a sweetness in my heart.
|
| 00:42:13.820 |
It still drips in my heart.
|
| 00:42:16.820 |
It's an amazing image.
|
| 00:42:17.820 |
Yeah, another thing that's really worth saying is before Dante goes into the attempt to describe that final sequence in the vision.
|
| 00:42:24.820 |
He has first a description of what it feels like to have lost it.
|
| 00:42:29.820 |
You know that it's like the snow melting or the leaves of the sible.
|
| 00:42:32.820 |
What a great, Virginian moment.
|
| 00:42:34.820 |
The leaves of the sible being cast of the wind.
|
| 00:42:36.820 |
So before he even attempts to make it happen for the reader, he lets you know what it's like to have lost it.
|
| 00:42:43.820 |
I think last time we alluded to the last line of the divine comedy about the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
|
| 00:42:52.820 |
Where the perspective now we've gone from the very pinnacle of heaven to right back down to earth in one verse.
|
| 00:43:01.820 |
No one verse.
|
| 00:43:02.820 |
Because it's only from the point of view of the earth that you see the sun first and then the other stars.
|
| 00:43:06.820 |
And talk about trying to encompass everything in one in Terzina.
|
| 00:43:11.820 |
You know just before that as Dante is really approaching the height of the universe, he has that other extraordinary image of, you know, the magic of Neptune.
|
| 00:43:21.820 |
And at the bottom of the sea seeing for the first time a shadow when the argo, the first ship passes.
|
| 00:43:29.820 |
And for the first time the light is blocked to the point where he can see the shadow.
|
| 00:43:33.820 |
And it's T.S. Eliot and many other poets have adored that.
|
| 00:43:36.820 |
And just the improbability of it is so extraordinary to be on the edge of the beat to the vision recalling Neptune at the bottom of the sea on the occasion of his first sight of a shadow.
|
| 00:43:50.820 |
The question I'd like to ask now that we've been transported in this Christian vision of the beatific.
|
| 00:43:59.820 |
And when we say vision we don't mean eyesight.
|
| 00:44:03.820 |
Dante means intellectual understanding or some form of spiritual comprehension rather than eyesight.
|
| 00:44:10.820 |
What does the Christian paradise, at least Dante's Christian paradise, have to do with human history and the earth?
|
| 00:44:19.820 |
Because it's not as if once we get to Padeza, the infernal problems of the earth above all factionalism, greed, corruption of the church.
|
| 00:44:33.820 |
These problems don't disappear.
|
| 00:44:35.820 |
In fact you could argue that in some cases Dante, in bays against them with a shrillness that had not been present even in the imperial.
|
| 00:44:47.820 |
I think that's actually interesting. I think sometimes the difficulty people have reading the parodieso isn't with the theology.
|
| 00:44:53.820 |
Because there isn't really that much of it that is much more made of it than really is there.
|
| 00:44:57.820 |
There are few candles, candles, seven and so forth.
|
| 00:45:00.820 |
But the theology is not overwhelming.
|
| 00:45:03.820 |
But the endless sort of carrying on about how terrible things are on earth might be the thing that overwhelming people sometimes that overwhelming to me.
|
| 00:45:11.820 |
I think the parodieso is informed by a profound historical pessimism, extraordinary historical pessimism, so that for example all the saints who are celebrated for having done major reform like St. Francis, St. Dominic, later St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, all these figures who Dante celebrates for what they did for the church.
|
| 00:45:32.820 |
He makes it clear that in every single case, whatever they did, it ended up coming to nothing because all these orders have degenerated.
|
| 00:45:39.820 |
So much so even for the church itself when he gets to St. Peter.
|
| 00:45:43.820 |
St. Peter thinks that whatever he and the early folks who were all martyr folks started, now the person occupying his CD says his CD says empty for one thing and it's turned into a sewer and so forth.
|
| 00:45:54.820 |
So that you get this kind of rundown of human history because it keeps going backwards.
|
| 00:45:59.820 |
These figures, Dante finally gets from the founders of the church to Adam as the last human soul that he meets with the exception of St. Bernard at the end.
|
| 00:46:07.820 |
But in every case you have this feeling that what starts out well ends up as a disaster.
|
| 00:46:13.820 |
So it also florance when he meets his ancestors in the very middle of parodieso and you have an evocation of Florence in the so-called good old days.
|
| 00:46:24.820 |
I don't think that neither you nor I would have wanted to inhabit the Florence of the good old days as Dante conceived it, very provincial small, almost village like play.
|
| 00:46:34.820 |
But it's a very radical or it's a big story and upon the letter they were all very chased at telling very tales and so were that's incredible.
|
| 00:46:42.820 |
We would probably prefer the Florence of the rest of the Florence of the proto-rennisons.
|
| 00:46:48.820 |
The Florence of Dante hates, which everybody else will celebrate that.
|
| 00:46:53.820 |
So where did this historical pessimism come from? Do you think it was just projecting from his own personal misfortune that we fell in as an exile?
|
| 00:47:03.820 |
The fact that he was never able to repatriate himself and reclaim his rightful standing as a citizen and so forth?
|
| 00:47:10.820 |
Or was it just part of a much larger Christian pessimism?
|
| 00:47:17.820 |
I don't think it's a Christian pessimism. I think there are moments in world history and Dante was in one of them and we may be another one of them.
|
| 00:47:23.820 |
Where you look around you? I mean, Dante was living through a great crisis of authority because there was a very strong in worldly papacy and there was no countervailing imperial power.
|
| 00:47:34.820 |
His one little hopeful moment was the Henry VII would come and become the emperor in that turned into a failure.
|
| 00:47:40.820 |
Can we talk a little bit about Henry VII, who was he and Dante's hope in an emperor?
|
| 00:47:47.820 |
People know that Dante was an apologist for empire, but I think there's a lot of misunderstanding that surrounds that.
|
| 00:47:54.820 |
When Dante looked around him and he saw everybody, everyone at each other's throats, he imagined somebody having enough power that he wouldn't be involved in this and that he could put an end to it so that Dante's dream was that.
|
| 00:48:07.820 |
Like Augustus had.
|
| 00:48:09.820 |
When Augustus very idealized version of Augustus, but as Augustus had put an end to the Civil Wars and Rome,
|
| 00:48:15.820 |
so Dante imagined someone named Henry VII who was going to come from Luxembourg and become the Holy Roman Emperor in that moment,
|
| 00:48:23.820 |
would have that kind of power and that all of this inter-nising warfare that was going on within cities and between cities would stop.
|
| 00:48:30.820 |
This was obviously a dream, on top of which it was a dream very early destroyed by the relatively early death of Henry VII,
|
| 00:48:38.820 |
after which there was an ever again another imperial figure.
|
| 00:48:41.820 |
Now the last great imperial figure would have been Frederick II, who died in 1250 and after all, Dante did put in hell among the heretics,
|
| 00:48:49.820 |
but who obviously Dante thought was a terrific emperor, which he was and had a great court.
|
| 00:48:54.820 |
I mean, Chae and literature was born at the court of Frederick II.
|
| 00:48:57.820 |
But strangely, it was never a hero of Dante.
|
| 00:49:00.820 |
I think he might have been, even though Dante puts him in hell, I think in the day of O'Garry when he talks about the first poems being called.
|
| 00:49:07.820 |
But he was certainly not a savior or a demer, the way he had these wild expectations for a while there that Henry VII would...
|
| 00:49:16.820 |
But Dante does save Frederick II's son, Manfred, who, that church had communicated, not to save him in purgatory.
|
| 00:49:23.820 |
So obviously Dante's ambiguous event, but I think Dante's fantasy is about Henry VII, which were really quite extraordinary letters that he writes.
|
| 00:49:31.820 |
Here comes the son of God.
|
| 00:49:33.820 |
I mean, he really saw him as a Messiah figure, and that just wasn't going to happen.
|
| 00:49:37.820 |
That's never going to happen in history, I think.
|
| 00:49:40.820 |
Also a strange misreading of Roman history.
|
| 00:49:43.820 |
He, not that must have known that after Augustus, it all did.
|
| 00:49:46.820 |
The G-Makers, it's sorry, degenerating in big time.
|
| 00:49:51.820 |
And yet there is, I think that the figure that most encapsulates what you were talking about, his pessimism, historical pessimism in regard to history is,
|
| 00:50:01.820 |
when finally the court of heaven, the Imperium is revealed to him,
|
| 00:50:09.820 |
Beatrice points to a throne, or a chair, reserved for Italy's last hope.
|
| 00:50:18.820 |
And made seventh.
|
| 00:50:19.820 |
Who was Henry VII.
|
| 00:50:21.820 |
Now, in 1300 Henry was still alive.
|
| 00:50:23.820 |
By the time Dante is writing the Patadizo, Henry's already dead.
|
| 00:50:27.820 |
And the tragic element there is that Beatrice says there was the last great hope.
|
| 00:50:35.820 |
But he came before Italy was ready, prima que fía di sposen.
|
| 00:50:41.820 |
And then you ask yourself, "Well, how does providential history work if the Emperor whom Dante believed was ordained by God?"
|
| 00:50:53.820 |
Is sent by God at the wrong time, or you know, people aren't ready to.
|
| 00:50:58.820 |
So what kind of redemption in history can where can it come from if it can't come from the Emperor?
|
| 00:51:05.820 |
Yeah, well, I think that's a huge problem.
|
| 00:51:07.820 |
And I think Dante's analysis of what's going on in his own moment in history is very accurate.
|
| 00:51:13.820 |
But his sense of a solution is not.
|
| 00:51:15.820 |
But I never would have gone for what happened subsequently, which was the triumph of humanism,
|
| 00:51:22.820 |
as the new sort of triumphalistic rhetoric of the self-reliance of the human.
|
| 00:51:28.820 |
And that we take charge of our own destiny.
|
| 00:51:31.820 |
We are the forgers of it.
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We're the makers of it.
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It's the almost fob it of the Renaissance and so forth.
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That is not an ideology that he would have willingly embraced.
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Well, I think part of him would have been deeply drawn to it just because of the kind of ambitions that he has, obviously.
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But he could never have openly done that.
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It really is profoundly unchristian in some way that notion.
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But you know, another interesting thing about Dante is if we say that all the things that people celebrate as proto-rennisons are things that Dante found wanting,
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if you look at Dante's picture of the good old days, the ideal time, it's a long time back.
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It's 12th century Florence.
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And it is as you pointed out Florence is a tiny town, not growing, noneconomically expanding.
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And even in Dante's own moment, people who had idealized visions of the city, I think of I'm brogiler and setty.
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Some decades later, but not meant 20 some odd years after Dante.
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But if you look at the image of the ideal city in brogiler and setty, it isn't exactly sienna, but it's an awful lot like sienna.
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So other people could imagine in their own historical moment, which is Dante's moment, things being more idealized in history.
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And Dante really can't, at least by the time of the parody, so he really does not imagine that.
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And I always, you know, I quote, "the only time I ever quote Heidegger is when I think of that great line only a god can save us.
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I think that's where Dante is at the end, in terms of history.
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There's nothing he can really imagine that we can do if it happens it's going to happen by divine intervention."
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And finally, to conclude our conversation, Rachel, we get back a little bit to the biographical, if you feel, because this is such a Christian poem.
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And you yourself being Jewish must feel that, well, there's a little bit of weirdness vis-a-vis my position within the Christian poem.
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And yet at the same time, in the Imperium, half of the saved souls are Hebrew, aren't they?
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That's right, and not only that, but Beatrice is sitting next to someone with my name.
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Right, exactly.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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But is that something that the larger question is, not whether one is Christian or not Christian, but whether it's, whether Dante's theology is something that's not a Christian or not Christian.
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Whether Dante's theology is something that you have to buy into in order to enter into the fascination of the poem as a whole, or whether it's something that you can always put in brackets as the phenomenologists used to say.
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The Epochae is, or is it a necessary condition for a certain kind of access?
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I don't know, it's a real question.
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And it's a question not only for people who are not Christian, or who are Christian as well.
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I mean, Eliot raises this question.
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I think, I mean, there are many great readers of Dante who are not Christians, or who certainly there are many great readers of Dante who are not believing Christians.
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I'm a poor atheist.
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Well, atheist, yeah.
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Sure.
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So, I don't know.
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I mean, I think everyone has to answer that question for themselves.
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I find that this is just one of the things, and one of the great works of art in my life, that I have gone back to that has helped me understand all kinds of things.
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Clearly, there are many things in it that are alien to me and always will be.
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But no more than, say, Handles Messiah, or Box Mess, and Be Mine.
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I mean, these are things that are foundational in my aesthetic experience, and it can't only be just aesthetics.
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I mean, there is some way that the spirituality of these works seems to me available to anyone.
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Yeah, I also think there's something about, as you were mentioning, that it's a Marion poem that the--
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That helps.
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In fact, it's not just God, Christ is not-- I don't want to say he's a minor presence, but he doesn't lord over the poem.
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Yeah.
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God doesn't lord over the poem.
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Not as if you could actually take them out of the picture, but this is a universe that's populated by saints and above all at the end, I think Mary, the centrality of Mary is something that we can all live with.
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Maybe our world is in need of it.
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Maybe we can revise, hide a girl's dictum there, only a God can say it was maybe get back to only Mary.
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I think you better put Baser of Back on.
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Baser of Back on.
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Yeah.
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Well, thanks a lot.
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It's been pleasure talking with you about the divine common.
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It's always a pleasure talking with you.
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We encourage our listeners to access the previous shows if you haven't heard them before, and have a good trip back to Wellesley.
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We've been speaking with Rachel Jacob from Wellesley.
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Thanks again, Rachel.
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Thank you for coming on.
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