They Moved The Thinker

Google’s search page reminded me of Rodin’s The Thinker again, it being the 172nd birthday of August Rodin today. This in turn moved me to find a photograph of the statue I’d first encountered at the north entrance of Kansas City’s then Nelson Gallery shortly after we had immigrated to the United States. We’d rented a house overlooking Gillham Park. Just a few blocks from south and east of there was the Gallery, as we called it, within easy walking-distance for recent Europeans. And there, at the back entrance, sat The Thinker. That was 1951. The Thinker sat there, from our point of view, for 56 long years, facing outward from the massive structure behind it and looking into the gloom of a dark wood, you might say. Okay. The wood wasn’t in any sense deep, but it was certainly dark. The figure represents Dante at the Gates of Hell:

Midway this way of life we’re bound upon

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.

     [Inferno, Canto I, Dorothy Sayers translation]

Well, I found out today that, in 2007—in order to make room for another rather modernistic addition to the currently named William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art—The Thinker got moved to the other side, facing south. That, in my opinion, was a bit of a mistake. The Thinker is now looking at a vast expanse of glorious green—and in the very, very far distance is Midwest Research Institute, where once I worked. Life at MRI had its ups and downs, but none of the downs even came close to Hell. Therefore the statue now seems out of place on that lawn. But down a ways from there, to the delight of all art lovers, is a gigantic badminton shuttlecock. You can see it on this blog here.

The Earlier Satanic Mill

What with the elevation of Hildegard of Bingen to the status of a Doctor of the Church, I was looking back to the times when she lived, the twelfth century. And it was a very interesting time. Some of the big names of that time, arranged here by year-of-birth, were Omar Khayyam, Hildegard, Thomas Becket, Frederick Barbarossa, Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Maimonides, Saladin, Genghis Khan, Ibn el Arabi, and Francis of Assisi. In perusing these patterns, I also stumbled upon something striking. It was the “birth date,” so to say, of a precursor of industrialization. The Arsenal of Venice was founded in 1104. It was still around and thriving when Dante wrote his Inferno, and the following quote (from Canto XXI, Sayers translation) ranks it squarely among the satanic mills:

For as at Venice, in the Arsenal

In winter-time, they boil the gummy pitch

To caulk such ships as need an overhaul,

Now that they cannot sail—instead of which

One builds him a new boat, one toils to plug

Seams strained by many a voyage, others stitch

Canvas to patch a tattered jib or lug,

Hammer at the prow, hammer at the stern, or twine

Ropes, or shave oars, refit and make all snug —

So, not by fire, but by the art divine

A thick pitch boiled down there [in hell], spattering the brink

With vicious glue; I saw this, but therein

Nothing; only great bubbles black as ink

Would rise and burst there; or the seething tide

Heave up all over, and settle again, and sink.

The Arsenal was something quite unbelievable for its time. It could assemble a complete sailing ship in the space of a day—from uniformly fabricated components made in other parts of the facility in what amounted to an assembly-line manner. In that time, elsewhere, such ships took months to build. Up to 100 ships were at various stages of completion in the shipyard. The factory occupied more than 100 acres, was surrounded by a thick wall, and employed 1,600 people. It was also used for refurbishing old ships, as Dante indicates. It got its name from also manufacturing munitions. Come to think of it, shipbuilding at such a scale was next accomplished by the U.S.A. during World War II.

I note here that Venice was a Republic then. Its governance took that form in 697—and ended with Napoleon’s conquest of Venice in 1797. On that same date, the Arsenal of Venice also ceased to function. Republics and satanic mills? Do they go together? William Blake’s formulation of that label (in his poem, Jerusalem) dated to a time when London had been shrouded in smoke and pollution as the capital of the nascent Industrial Revolution. As for us, today, we mourn the passing of those mills but under the milder name of manufacturing. There they stand, those mills, abandoned; and the wind blows litter and plastic bags over vacant lots. Such is human fate. Love it and lose it. Wish it, get it, curse it, and mourn the idyllic past—but when it threatens to return, mourn that return in turn.

---------------

As an addendum here, let me note that the average life span of the famous people named above was 67 years; the thinkers lived longer; the warriors passed earlier; the martyr, Becket, died at 52; perhaps the most intense of them all, Francis, only lived to be 45.  The three with the longest lives were Khayyam (83), Hildegard (81), and Ibn el Arabi (75).

This Too Shall Pass

I happened across an evidently well-known Virgil quote yesterday on Laudator. It must be well known because I found it easy to get a translation of the phrase into English, not present where I saw it. On Laudator I always feel decidedly like a fellahin, and justly so. Here is the quote:

Dabit Deus his quoque finem.

God will also bring this to an end—which just happens to match one of our most basic sayings within Ghulfdom, and we are not alone.

The more we know the more humble we ought to be—because as knowledge expands so does awareness of the vast universes we’ve not even approached. Having read Dante a while back I couldn’t help but become very aware of Virgil, Dante’s guide right to the gates of heaven. In that connection I looked up the poet, read bits. Of course I’d also read or used other snippets from him (see this, for instance). With the Roman culture I am exactly in the same position as those who used bricks and stones from once splendid Roman architectural works to build their hovels. I meant to read the Aeneid, one of these days, the celebration of Rome’s foundation, but to speak of an urge here is incorrect. Whether in writing that work Virgil was celebrating the Augustan age or poetically critiquing it, that scholars are still debating. In any case his focus was the founding of what I view as a secular domain, which interests me not at all. And I don’t even have a child’s Latin any more, hence I can’t appreciate Virgil’s works in the original.

Nevertheless, like a child, having found that quote, I ran upstairs to read it to Brigitte with a manner, although camouflaged in a 75-year-old body, of a little boy: “Look, Ma! Look what I found!”

Attitudes to Iron

One of our most persistent tendencies as humans is to produce the mirage of the Golden Age. We project this age both backward and forward in time. It is a poetic creation (of course). In the Greek-Roman the poet Hesiod (didn’t those fellows have a first name?) produced the metallic classification—Gold, Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and Iron. In all of the variants of it, surprise!, we always live the Iron Age, whenever we happen to live. Paradise is the golden age of the Hebraic tradition, but because it appears in the Bible, the Garden does not usually appear in a recital of ages.

A comment here about the Heroic age—clearly not a metal. It was Hesiod’s way to refer to a period like our Second World War, thus when great heroes fill the earth—the Greatest Generation, etc. In Hesiod’s case, the reference is to the twelfth century BC, the time of the Trojan War. There are wars, you see, dime a dozen, and then there are Wars!

Golden ages that we find looking back we also discern ahead in time. But those who see the gleam of gold ahead are still writing in the Age of Iron. That age we know only too well. Virgil, positioned at the transit between the Roman Republic and Roman Empire—well, actually, in the early Empire, foresaw a future golden age in these lines (Eclogue IV, 5-8):

The age Cumaean Sybil sang has passed.
New centuries begin to roll at last.
Virgo now reigns, Saturn resumes the throne,
The Iron Age is past and gone,
A golden race arises from the rust.
Heaven has sent a new breed down to us.

Yes, I’ve tackled Virgil too, but not the Latin—just “fixing” translations into English.

Indeed one’s tempted to judge a culture by the poetic images by means of which it captures the looking back and looking forward. The glory of the Second Coming contrasts sharply with the Marxist future in which a Classless Society dawns as the State Withers Away.

The certainty that all ages are made of iron recurs to me every time I look closely into a period as yet unfamiliar to me—particularly when that time is described by a contemporary. In the high Middle Age Dante looked back to Virgil’s time in awe—and ahead to the effective restoration of the Holy Roman Empire. His own time was corruption squared, of course. He transcended this feeling by writing poetry about an idealized Beatrice in the heights of Heaven.

A transcendental attitude toward the grind of the Age of Iron is relatively rare—and a transcendental but practical approach does not attract the masses either. That attitude is encased in the saying: “Be in the world but not of it.” The maxim is very well known and has an unambiguously religious flavor. For this reason lots of people think that it is somewhere in the Bible. Google shows many people trying to find it there.

The curious fact is that this saying comes from the Sufis—and isn’t in the Qur’an either. Its original is Persian: Dar Dunya Básh: Az Dunya Mabásh. Be in the world but not of the world. It’s a rhyming maxim, thus mnemonic. Not that it takes a rhyme to remember it.

The more ordinary attitudes to life in this valley are resentment, aggression, combat—or withdrawal, indifference, resignation. Being in the world, to the contrary, strongly suggests sincere, energetic, and active participation—including service and effort—but with the heart detached. By “world,” of course, neither the Sufis nor the public nor I really mean the wonders of nature or the starry skies.

A Tea Party in Flatland

The chief marker of a secular era is its worldly and temporal character—this in contrast to a religious era in which the spiritual and eternal aspects of reality are emphasized. Let’s ignore the debate about the claims of either era and proceed. In secular times the spiritual and eternal are simply denied all standing but are tolerated as life-style choices. In religious times the world is still recognized as real, but its importance is minimized. If we express the secular in geometrical terms as a flat surface and the religious as a vertical, it turns out that the religious conception of reality is the more complex of the two. It has a third dimension that the secular times lack. So far, so good. In a flat cosmology time itself is a function of matter with its threefold divisions into past, present, and future.

When troubles erupt in secular ages, two ways of coping with the problem tend always to surface—and only two. Only two because a transcending movement into the vertical, as it were, isn’t thought to be possible. Part of the public embraces the future which, still unknown and not yet realized, may be envisioned to hold the sought-after relief. The others, especially those in a better economic shape—who tend to remember better times—envision the solution to lie in a return to an earlier and happier period. Living memories are short; hence the real past is largely forgotten or only selectively recalled. Thus the past’s as good a canvas on which to paint a golden age as is the future.

Futurism and archaism. These labels were framed by Arnold Toynbee, the cyclic historian. In effect, of course, both are futuristic in the sense that any new order much desired will be achieved, if achieved at all, in the future. The labels therefore refer to strategies. Futurists wish to achieve the new order by ridding themselves of current restraints; archaists hope to bring back into the present what they imagine has been lost.

The French Revolution serves as a classical and large-scale example of a real try at futurism. Its henchmen even changed the names of the months on the calendar. The current Tea Party movement serves as a minor example of an archaist reaction to the initiatives of the Obama administration. That administration is wrongly seen as futurist in its intentions. Alas, it’s merely rational—but unfortunately also inept. Its futurist coloration is a very pale shade of pink and derives from the illusion that change can be made almost entirely by magical PR gestures intended to influence public opinion.

Secularism see-saws this way, back and forth. These dreary rounds remind me of Hell’s fourth circle where, on a flat piece of territory, hoarders and squanderers roll gigantic rocks against each other, crash, separate, and do it all again. Here is the scene in Dante’s words in Dorothy Sayers’ translation (Inferno, Canto VII, 22-36):

         As waves against encountering waves advance
             Above Charybdis, clashing with toppling crest,
             So must the folk here dance and counter-dance.

         More than elsewhere, I saw them thronged and pressed
             This side and that, yelling with all their might,
             And shoving each a great weight with his chest.

         They bump together, and where they bump, wheel right
             Round, and return, trundling their loads again,
             Shouting: “Why chuck away?” “Why grab so tight?”

         Then round the dismal ring they pant and strain
             Back on both sides to where they first began
             Still as they go bawling their rude refrain;

         And when they meet, then each re-treads his span,
             Half round the ring to joust in the other list;
             I felt quite shocked, and like a stricken man.

But you don’t have to go to hell to see it. CNN will bring it to you live.
--------------------
For more on “Charybdis,” see the previous post.

Fame at Last

It gives me a certain satisfaction to be able to announce—a mere day after I learned of this event—that one of my great literary heroes (these tend always to be very obscure) is about to achieve, after a wait of nearly 700 years, genuine fame and well-deserved celebrity beginning on February 9, 2010. Dante’s Inferno is now at last available as a video game, the author of the work himself featured as its action hero—triumphant, tall, grim, muscular, in shiny armor, his weapon an awesome scythe. Dante comes to us by the grace of Electronic Arts Inc. EA, as the company styles itself, had revenues in 2009 of $4.2 billion, thus qualifying it as hefty enough to present DA (as Dante would no doubt style himself these days) to the youth of our day. EA’s slogan for the game is “Go to Hell - Send sinners to hell, torment and punish them.” In the graphic the Os in “Go to” have a little cross inside them by way of a hat tip to Christianity. Very tastefully done, I must say. You can tell from every detail of the art, the audio, the action, the rollout, and the promotion that the EA team charged with this challenging assignment has left nothing to chance. By all means pre-order your copies now lest you be denied entrance to Hell when the cherished day arrives. With the product secured, you will be able to enjoy the triumphant Television Debut of Inferno by EA in a state of relaxation as the event is announced with trumpets to the mundane earthly scene by ads during the upcoming Superbowl.

When the Ordinary is Extraordinary

I spent much time during the last half of 2009 getting to know Dante and his era. Dante saw his times with anguish. The universal state (the Holy Roman Empire) just would not take hold over the secular sphere. And Dante thought that the Church had fallen into corruption. Indeed, the poet wrote two centuries before the unity of Christendom formally fell apart beginning in 1517 when Luther wrote The 95 Theses.

With this as background, I was oddly surprised yesterday to learn of an event that had taken place on November 4. We were in the sunroom, Brigitte reading aloud from The American Conservative (February 2010 issue). She came to an article that made us both sit up. The article, by William S. Lind, was titled “Come All Ye Faithful, Benedict’s Counter-Reformation.” As the story unfolded, it struck me that the tide Dante saw receding might now be returning after centuries—and what I might be hearing is news of a change with possibly far-reaching cultural consequences. I’d label this “A Ray of Sunlight” if it were not, at this point, extremely tentative.

In brief. Pope Benedict XVI published an Apostolic Constitution on November 4, 2009. Such a “constitution” is a change in church law. In this one, entitled Anglicorum Coetibus (Groups of Anglicans), Benedict announces that entire Anglican congregations—people, clergy, parishes, dioceses—may enter the Catholic communion at their initiative while retaining their Anglican rites, liturgy, identity, and self-governance. The constitution is available here. It is subtitled “Providing for personal ordinariates for Anglicans entering into full communion with the Catholic Church.”

Those who follow the trials and tribulations of churches know why the Pope may have acted and why some Anglicans may respond to his invitation. The mainstream Protestant churches have been secularizing, so to say, embracing a social gospel while letting the traditional faith erode. And in implementing changes pleasing to Modernity these churches have alienated large elements of the traditionally devout within them. Anglicanism is already cleaving into parts.

A brief look taught me that I’m inadequate to understand fully, or fast enough, the vast complexities in canon law and history involved here, but Lind’s interesting article seems to be on target, and I recommend it. It isn’t available online, but a subscription may be obtained here and I’ve seen The American Conservative on sale at Borders, for instance. Here I will merely cite three points that Lind himself highlights (among many others)—and are in the linked constitution in much dryer language. First, existing married clergy would be eligible for ordination under Anglicorum Coetibus. Second, all Anglicans who rejoin the Catholic Church at Benedict’s invitation would be required to profess the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism contains the doctrine of papal infallibility. Lind sees problems here but hopes that ways may be found to ease that pain, especially in light of the fact that the Anglican break with the Church predated that doctrine's promulgation (in 1870). Third, the incoming Anglicans would be under the rule of their own ordinaries, not subjected to existing bishops.

So what is an ordinary and what is an ordinariate? An ordinariate, I discovered, corresponds to a diocese, but one without a geographical boundary. The Church already has many such ordinariates to serve far-flung military commands. The ordinary, consequently, is the person responsible for such groupings. Webster’s definition: “a prelate exercising original jurisdiction over a specified territory or group.” He may be a priest or a bishop. Every bishop is thus an ordinary, but not every ordinary is a bishop. A personal ordinariate (in the language of the constitution) means one without a geographically-defined territory.

All this, of course, is Extraordinary! Brigitte and I grew quite lively at the prospect that some kind of unification of the faithful may eventually emerge from all this, the Anglicans representing the tip of a melting iceberg. Global Warming in a new sense. If it happens it will take a long time, no doubt as long as the breakup of Christendom took from the time when Dante noted the appearance of ugly cracks. Brigitte and I will long be gone. Lind sketches the possibilities of this in sufficient detail so that possible, even plausible, paths leading to unification of the faithful become thinkable.

The Scale's the Thing

The strange thing to your left is the photo of something like a map; it is called the Rand McNally Histomap of World History, by John B. Sparks. It purports to show the relative importance of nations and empires 1950 B.C. to 2000 A.D. This object hung on the back of the door, the door into my office—when I still had an office outside the home—and on the rare occasions when I closed that door, the large pink blob in the center of this histomap reminded me of the Glory That Was Rome. — Did so, indeed, until, on one occasion, I looked at the graphic seriously and discovered that the image did not have a horizontal scale.

I dug out the rolled up copy again this morning. I had been reading Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet, a philosophical work) in which our poet urges us (Chapter 4, Book 4) to accept the concept of an imperial ruler because Rome’s preeminence had led to God’s own approval of the Latin people as the exemplars of mankind.

That claim then reminded me of my retired map; I found it on a shelf. But over all these years I had forgotten about the missing scale at the bottom of this curious object. Indeed, if you accept John Sparks’ imaginative scaling, Rome does seem, during this vast expanse of time, to be by far the largest single domain ever to grace the globe. Then, sitting down at the machine again to consult the oracle about the scale once more—thinking that in the intervening time I had become so much more skilled at Googling that I would be successful now—I discovered that the missing scale is missing still. What had changed, in the meantime, is that lots of people had discovered this lack and had made their displeasure known. Too bad.

I had fairly recently looked at population data reaching back into antiquity and discovered in that process that Sparks could not have used headcounts to size his empires and realms. Not enough menaningful data. He may have used geographical extent—but surely, with Rand McNally as his publisher, someone there should have reminded him to note the fact. Yes, at its greatest extent Rome’s footprint pretty much covered Europe and bits of Africa and Asia, but how much territory did China then occupy—and India? Their populations, by guess and by golly, must have been quite large even then.

Well, too bad. We carry mental maps and censuses inside our heads—and in Dante’s world the memory of Rome, and the more recent memory of Charlemagne’s empire, still loomed very large. And, to be sure, Dante (1265-1321) might have known of Marco Polo (1254-1324) but may not have read Polo’s Il Milione; he was busy writing his own opus and may have written his Convivio (finished circa 1307) before he had heard of Kublai Khan.

The second photo shows the histomap from closer up, focus on Rome—as it usually is here in the West as we look back in time. Great realm! But without a scale, how can we know for sure that Octavian ascended the throne of empire with a nod from on High? If Dante had studied China, however, he might well have added the useful concept of The Mandate of Heaven to his arguments in Chapter 4, Book 4.

---------------------
If you can stomach the price, Amazon will sell you this item even today: Histomap of World History.

The Inconstancy of Fortune

The Wayne Country Treasurer once more issued a paid supplement to the Detroit Free Press advertising listings of forfeited properties subject to foreclosure. The supplement runs to 127 pages. I sampled some pages, counted the listings, and the extended that count to the entire publication. Thus I conclude that the county wishes to seize something like 26,400 properties because their owners, listed with every posting, have failed to pay taxes.

Everything leaves its paper trail in modern culture. Those of us who, sometimes—perhaps because visitors want to see the devastation they’ve heard about in the news—engage on hour-long drives into the abandoned wastes of the City of Detroit thus could, if we wished, thanks to the labors of our county treasurer, actually identify the people who once inhabited homes through the broken roofs of which now strong trees are growing. In summer the structures are sometimes quite hidden by the obscuring foliage.

This reminded me of an essay in my The Portable Renaissance Reader, written by Poggio Bracciolini in 1430 and titled “The Ruins of Rome.” Goes around comes around. Bracciolini, in company of his friend, Antonio Lusco, ride out and mount the Capitoline hill. From there, dismounting, they survey a scene of Rome in ruins and meditate about the inconstancy of fortune. Curiously the chapter of my Portable Reader in which this essay is reproduced is titled “Learning of the Best Sort.” I find that apt today. Because in some ways it is instructive to contemplate the movements of the great water-wheel of time. It descends into the depth empty but rises again at right repeating rotations carrying the living waters to disgorge them into channels. At times we see the water, at times the emptiness. And to see both is to learn something meaningful.

The mood of reading Dante is still present for me. And reading the Divine Comedy strongly reminded me that the extreme compressions that produce words like “The Renaissance” hide the reality beneath temporary glows of light or gathering darkness that different eras manage to produce. Dante’s times, seen from the ground, as he saw them, were not that different from ours. And he wrote at a time  roughly 130 years or so before Bracciolini sorrowed over Rome. I wonder what Rome looked like in Dante’s days. Not much better, I don’t suppose. The balance of good and evil in every time is much the same.

In Praise of Maps

On a visit to Leningrad some years ago I consulted a map to find out where I was, but I could not make it out. From where I stood, I could see several enormous churches, yet there was no trace of them on my map. When finally an interpreter came to help me, he said: “We don’t show churches on our maps.” Contradicting him, I pointed to one that was very clearly marked. “That is a museum,” he said, “not what we call a ‘living church.’ It is only the ‘living churches’ we don’t show.” [First paragraph of E.F. Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed]

It has been a while since I have praised maps and their makers, but maps came into focus the other day—and last night again in the highest context—so I thought I would sink another benchmark in this survey. The first reminder came when we were slightly disoriented in Roseville, MI. We discovered that we had maps of the State of Missouri, of the cities of Quebec in Canada, Traverse City in Michigan, and Lake George in New York quite handy, but to find the map of this area led to frantic clawing. At last, here it was—South-East Michigan! And what a relief it was!

The other polarity of today’s inspiration was a set of diagrams in my edition of the Divine Comedy. I was looking at them last night in my by now out-of-breath ascent of the peak of Paradise. The thought came then, falling asleep, that great works all have the quality of maps. In Dante, one is always keenly aware of his own quite serious intent on producing an accurate cosmic map—the depths, the earth, the heavens. For Henry Corbin, that obscure but admirable philosopher of the invisible, orientation is a constant concern. Schumacher quite consciously set out to make a philosophical map in the work cited above. And my own life-long interest in the cyclic historians is anchored in my determination to see the big picture before I worry about the small.

Obviously map-making is not a peculiarly modern urge, although the really great advances in earth-measurement are modern. I was fascinated a while back by the figure of Colin MacKenzie (1754-1821); I encountered him in a show on PBS. He turned heaven and earth upside down in his attempts to survey India, and I became aware of the difficulties of this kind of work. I have a fine book, The Measure of All Things, by Ken Adler. It documents the labors of Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre (1749-1822), Pierre-François-André Méchain (1744-1804), and Joseph-Jérôme Lalande (1732-1807) who, in the midst of the French Revolution, and working right through it, in effect finessing and ignoring it, working with both sides in the conflict, mapped and measured the meridian that runs from Dunkerque through Paris to Barcelona in efforts of establish the length of the meter, defined as one-ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator. Such heroic work underlies all of our maps. We fold them any-which-way and toss them into drawers whereas, if we but knew the underlying labors, we would place them reverently high up on our shelves.

Back in Minnesota days I used to take Winnie (yellow Lab, a notable canine Ghulf) on his walk. We followed the tracks of Burlington Northern from the edges of suburban settlements into the wilds. One of my stops was a bridge across a creek. Winnie would run down the near-vertical drop off to forage along the shore and drink water. And down there, each time he descended, he passed a survey stone. As I became more knowledgeable about the art and science of earth measurement, that stone, initially just a grey thing with a mark, took on the character of a monument to a tribe of people too much neglected in the world’s history—while we make destroyers and powerful madmen famous.

Maps of all kinds—and obscure figures working away to perfect them. They deserve a nod and the occasional recognition. Was lost, but now, with their assistance, I am found.

Empire Now and Then

In Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso, we enter a high heaven, that of Jupiter, where warrior saints have their space of manifestation. And up there, in a sphere already bright and silvery (the sixth of seven heavens) bright lights—but these lights are alive, they are the warrior saints—conjoin to print out a command in Latin, in the sky as it were, which means “Love justice, ye that judge the earth.” The final word of this command ends in the word TERRAM, and that word of course ends in M. Now as the canto develops, the lights begin to transform the final M of the command into the image of the Roman Eagle—a symbol that somewhat resembles the letter if the bird’s wings are lowered; you need but add a neck and head and elaborate the descending lines into wings and tail.

In Dante’s day the Roman Empire was dead, dead, dead—and I mean like the dodo. And its nostalgic revival, in the form of the Holy Roman Empire, just would not, would not hold together. But we are at a point (early fourteenth century) when the Renaissance is dawning. The world was turning its face toward the sensory; a great nostalgia for the glory that was Rome possessed our poet. He elaborates this feeling throughout the Divine Comedy, and he also elaborated it in less poetic form in his book on monarchy. Therefore this symbol of military power, might, and conquest is made to appear in a very high heaven. And nothing happens in those heavens without the absolute sanction of God. Therefore this eagle, and emphatically the Roman eagle, is a symbol of God.

The passionate and thick entwinement between this and a projected transcendental world is a characteristic aspect of Dante’s work—and greatly amusing to discover how very thickly populated with Italians are hell, purgatory, and paradise. Amusing to discover how keenly the noble, high, and long-since departed concern themselves with what we would now call the sordid, grimy politics of a corrupt era—or perhaps Dante’s visit gave them a welcome respite from the tedium of perpetual divine contemplation?

In any case, that damned Eagle startled me—not that I hadn’t gotten a bit uneasy in the pursuit of Paradise already. My view of Empire is much darker than Dante’s. I’m not taking my cue about Rome from Virgil, who wrote as Empire was just beginning and had barely any track record as yet. I see the whole bloodstained brutal history of Empire and live in a time that trends in the same direction once again. And of course, quite like Dante, I make the foolish mistake of looking backward with nostalgia to medieval and earlier times, entirely overlooking fact, seeing only those things that appeal. Recognizing this sort of habitual perception as a mere climate of emotions, waking up in the morning as I did, sobered and irritated, makes me sympathetic to a gnostic view served straight in a shot-glass.
———————
Image from the the Chauvin family linage site.

Blaming the Victim

It brought me wry amusement to discover the following stanza in Dante’s Paradiso last night. It comes from Canto XVII in which Dante encounters one of his forebears, Cacciaguida, who predicts Dante future for him. Dante, of course, wrote these lines after he already knew that future, having lived it. He was banished from Florence and condemned to death in one of the endless and often violent political conflicts of his day. Cacciaguida is the voice behind the lines, and, commenting on Dante's fate, he says:

The injured side will bear the common blame
As ever; but the day of reckoning,
By truth appointed, shall the truth proclaim.

Two different translations (the above is Dorothy Sayers’) are these: Charles Eliot Norton: “The blame will follow the injured party, in outcry, as is wont; but the vengeance will be testimony to the truth which dispenses it.” The Carlyle-Okey-Wicksteed translation: “The blame shall cleave unto the injured side in fame, as is the wont; but vengeance shall bear witness to the truth which doth dispense it.”

Now considering the fact that Dante began to write the Divine Comedy in 1308 and probably wrote these lines toward the end of his life (he died in 1321)—and given the phrasing of the leading sentiment (“as ever,” “as is the wont”)—we must conclude that blaming the victim, known as old news in the fourteenth century, is certainly a well-entrenched habit of humanity. What is our contribution to this stellar side of human behavior? We've managed to shorten the phrasing down to three words in English. As I remember from studying linguistics a good ways back, as languages persist, they grow ever more brisk, succinct. Long words get chopped, and long concepts too. Thou shalt blame the victim must surely belong among the first five commandments of Satan’s ten.

An Addendum: Mantua

Virgil was born in Mantua, in Northern Italy. And Dante was born in—and exiled from—Florence, located just to the south and east of Mantua, hence, no doubt, he felt more than merely a poetic kinship to the figure he appointed to be his guide in Hell and Purgatory. The map shows these two locations: these days, obeying a new interest in geography, I just go and look.

As I was writing the last post, a German phrase kept playing in my head, over and over again: Zu Mantua in Banden… I turned to Brigitte to enlighten me, and she produced more of the verse. The line comes from a poem celebrating a Tyrolean rebellion against Napoleon led by Andreas Hofer. His rebellion failed; he was executed in Mantua. And years later Julius Mosen wrote a poem titled Andreas Hofer, but better known in Germany, where we used to sing it as well, by the phrase that I remembered. I managed to find an English translation of the poem here—thus saving me a couple of hours of difficult translation. I could not pin down the translator’s name beyond the fact that it is W. The first verse in German, then in Latin, follows.

At Mantua, in fetters,
The Faithful Hofer lay;
To death, to death in Mantua,
Bears him the foe away;—
His brothers’ hearts they beat and bleed;
All Deutschland lies in shame and need;
And with it—land Tyrol.

Zu Mantua in Banden
Der treue Hofer war,
In Mantua zum Tode
Führt ihn der Feinde Schar.
Es blutete der Brüder Herz,
Ganz Deutschland, ach in Schmach und Schmerz.
: Mit ihm das Land Tirol,
Mit ihm das Land Tirol. :

En Mantuae e vinclis
Fidelem Hoferum
Ad mortem, vae, ducebat
Caterva hostium;
Divulsa est Germania
Dolore, ignominia
Et una Tyrolis.
Et una Tyrolis.

Oh. I should have humbly noted somewhere above, near the names of Virgil and Dante, that I too once lived in Mantua. It was, to be sure, just a development in Fairfax Virginia, but that name does sort of cling even to casual minstrels wandering the wilderness.

Reading Dante in Detroit

A few years ago Monique gave me Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran—and just tracing that experience would suffice for a post. For one thing members of my extended family (Ghulf Genes, you might say) include children born of an Iranian woman, hence blood lines connect us back to Persia too. Indeed, whenever a country comes into focus in one or another context, I can trace tendrils of relationship—and strong ones, too, either of blood or spirit. But here my only purpose is to justify the title of this posting, to indicate the same kind of tension between cultures that Nafisi had in mind when she sat down to trace her own experiences as a woman and a teacher.

Yes. I’m reading the Divine Comedy, all of it this time, and slowly, with real attention. This too runs in the family’s spiritual genes. My mother would have done that sort of thing in her advanced years and Monique’s mate, John, is prone to feats like that as well—a kind of heroic determination to achieve the impossible, which is to grasp the entire culture, ancient and near, even if only by a few grand gestures. When I began reading Purgatory, I smiled as I read Dorothy Sayers’ introduction, in the first paragraph of which she says: “Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at.” Or, Sayers may have added, “something to quote.” She should have put that into her general introduction to nudge people on, beyond the Inferno, which is, as its name implies, a very dismal place. And arriving at the base of Mount Purgatory, one is astonished (I was) at the sudden change.

Culture is, ultimately, a system of shared values. Great literature holds these values. Its neglect is therefore either part of cultural change or cultural decay. If the value system continues to be renewed by great new works of art and philosophy, the sliding of the awkwardly dated back into the past is no matter of regret. But if the new has lost its nicotine, as it were, like fake cigarettes intended to wean us of smoking, the loss is genuine.

The cultural process is sharply discernible in the Comedy. In the first two books Dante’s guide is Virgil, the Latin poet famed for his Georgics and Aeneid, the last an epic account of Rome’s founding. The stories and myths in which Dante himself anchors his values are drawn from Graeco-Roman sources and the Bible, his philosophy is based on “moderns,” like Thomas Aquinas, and ancients, like Aristotle. The time distance between Virgil’s death and Dante’s birth is 1284 years. In 2009, we are 688 years from Dante’s death in 1321. Hence, for us, Dante stands closer in time than the towering figure of Virgil stood to him. The speed of change, however, has been so great in modern times that Dante appears to us at least 1300 years back, subjectively, rather than a mere 700.

It’s much more difficult today to get even a feel for the vast extent of human culture. Dante published his Comedy, if you can call it publishing, by having parts of it copied by hand as they were written, entirely in response to the demands of his friends. Printing still lay in the future. Today we can get dozens of translations of the Tao Te Ching, for example, and the best literature of any country we desire to read. And we have languages to master if we really wish to be serious students. I could here write a post titled Reading Goethe in German, for example, or Reading Madács in Hungarian. I’ve done both. Goethe’s name everyone knows, but Madács is known only to Hungarians. He wrote the all-time classic play called The Tragedy of Man. When you expend your energy in projects like that, you haven’t got time left to make money, do you? Anyway, that’s my excuse for failing in the American Way.

Terza Rima

All hope abandon if you hope to scale the peak
That Dante mastered in his own medieval time—
Unless you are prepared by effort now to seek

To learn that poet’s subtle, perfect tercet rhyme,
The early steps of which demand that you retain
The subtle a-b-a’s by means of which you climb

Your personal high Paradiso by refrain,
Your second verse, same as the first, but now the scheme
Becomes a b-c-b and so on once again

Until a thousand verses hence you’ve filled a ream
With lines, narration, pristine images galore
Neglecting not a sublime, lofty, noble theme

In which chaste caritas ranks high above amor
In which you hold converse with saintly Beatrice
Although in Hell you may have chatted with a whore.

There is but one thing more, a bit of artifice:
Your last two lines should stand alone to mark the end
And rhyme the one with next the way that couples kiss.

The last rhyme takes its sound, as you must apprehend
From the middle line above, on which it must depend.

To which I need merely add my admiration for Dorothy Sayers who did The Divine Comedy using this lofty, chained rhyme scheme, much harder to achieve in English than Italiano. And, by way of a P.S., I must note that this little instruction in how to do the terza rima is written in hexameter whereas, the authorities on high strongly recommend iambic pentameter instead, bowing to such greats as Frost, Shelley, Chaucer—and, indeed, Dante himself, although that sovereign of poetry grandly shorted five or spilled from five to six and often up to seven whenever the spirit so happened to move him.

Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957)

She is known to the public (if known by name at all) as the creator of a fictional detective, Lord Peter Whimsey. Most people of my generation encountered Whimsey on public TV in a series that featured several of Sayers’ novels. Whimsey was a member of the British nobility—and rich, Sayers once said, because she was so poor; so why not indulge herself and enjoy his wealth vicariously? Some of us went on to discover Sayers the writer curious what the original of those fun TV series sounded like in print. And a much smaller number, I assume, went beyond that and also discovered what might be called her contributions to the higher ranges of twentieth century culture. She contributed a new, true translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy; she was a leader in educational reform; she was a feminist but from a traditional perspective; an original thinker and able defender of traditional Anglicanism; Sayers, in short was a notable person. She is one of the people I value and admire. It is through the creative efforts of people like Dorothy Sayers that we shall sail through the storms of modernism into a new era of expanding hope with our values still intact.

Sayers was long a favorite of ours—and I’d read most of her novels—when I discovered the author’s higher registers, as it were, by an indirect route. Brigitte gave me Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence for Christmas in 2000. (“To my favorite historian with love, B”). This book, which I also highly recommend as a valuable orientation to modern life, covers cultural history from 1500 to 2000. Barzun’s approach is to tell the history and then to punctuate it with brief profiles of notable figures examined in some detail. The first three such figures are Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin (whose 500th anniversary is just four days away); others are not well known, like John Lilburne (a Puritan politician) and Joseph Glanvill (an early philosopher of science); many, of course, like Oliver Cromwell, Madame de Staël, and Oliver Wendell Holmes are readily recognized. I was thus surprised and delighted to encounter Dorothy Sayers’ name in a chapter entitled “The Artist Prophet and Jester” on page 741. Here I learned, for the first time, of Sayers’ book The Mind of the Maker and almost immediately bought it. Here is Barzun’s summary:

Its thesis is that ordinary experience of making anything—creating art or applying workmanship to any object—corresponds to the meanings symbolized by the Trinity. First comes the creative Idea, which foresees the whole work as finished. This is the Father. Next the creative Energy, which engages in a vigorous struggle with matter and overcomes one obstacle after another. This is the Son. Third is the creative Power of the work, its influence on the world through its effect on the soul of the user-beholder. This is the Holy Spirit. All three are indispensable to completeness as they unite in the work. [Barzun,p. 742]

Sayers was also a scholar of note, in possession of Latin, Greek, and French acquired during her education at Oxford. Her research suggested to her that she might be able to translate Dante. She set about learning Italian next and then tackled the job. She intended to reproduce Dante’s verse scheme, known as terza rima. This is a three-line form in which the first and third lines rhyme; the next tercet’s first line rhymes with the last one’s middle line. And so on it flows. Sayers translation attempts to stay true to the original. I’ll return to this in another post. She also tried to capture Dante’s humor and sarcasm. As Barzun points out, part of Dante’s purpose was to scourge his enemies and praise his friends.

Sayers completed Inferno, Purgatorio, and almost finished the last book too. But a woman’s work is never done. She died abruptly at age 64 and finished her labor, I assume, in Paradisio.