By Dr. Matthew Ramage | Matthew Ramage is assistant professor of theology
at Benedictine College (Kan.). He earned his M.A. from Franciscan University and
his Ph.D. from Ave Maria University. His scholarly emphases focus on St. Thomas
Aquinas and Pope Benedict XVI. The title
of his doctoral dissertation is
“Towards a Theology of Scripture: Joseph Ratzinger’s ‘Method C’ Hermeneutic and
Sacra Doctrina on the Afterlife in the Old Testament.”
As my family was living in Dante’s home of Florence last semester, one of
the courses I co-offered with my theologian-wife was a seminar on Dante’s Divine
Comedy, the foundational work of the Italian language which remains as relevant
to our Christian lives today as ever. I’d like to share some thoughts from our
class discussion and my reflection. The translation quoted below is from is a
great newer one by Anthony Esolen which contains Dante’s original Italian verse
on the left and the English on the right–I highly recommend it. Here are the
five thoughts:
1. “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark
wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true.” All of us who read
the opening lines of the Comedyhave wandered from the narrow way and find
ourselves—to one degree or another—immersed in the hellish mire of sin. Dante
wants to sear this reality in our minds as we read his work and are invited to
join him in a grand journey through the realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
If you read the Comedy on a superficial level, you miss the fact that Dante
purposely intended it to contain multiple levels of meaning—“spiritual senses,”
as we call them in Sacred Scripture. Thus the Comedy depicts Dante’s physical
journey through Hell (literal sense), but, as Dorothy Sayers observes in her
masterful Thomistic notes to the text, this is actually the least important part
of the work. What goes on here represents the final state of man’s perdition
(anagogical sense). It further signifies Dante’s—and in turn our own—downward
journey through ignorance and sin (moral sense) before we begin to ascend the
mountain of conversion in the Purgatorio. Applying this to our lives, we can
benefit a great deal already from this opening canto: “How I entered, I can’t
bring to mind…when I first left the way of truth behind.” Dante’s descent into
Hell (the vicious cycle of sin) begins almost imperceptibly, as in a dreaming
state. Every one of us often falls in this same way. We start with something
“small,” something that hardly seems a sin, and before you know it you’ve ended
up with a seemingly unbreakable vice. If you read C.S. Lewis, in particular his
Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce, you see the markings of Dante all over
the place, as when he has the master demon instructing his understudy not to
cast great temptations before Christians at first, lest they notice that they’re
being tempted and fly to God. This line of Dante also reminds us of the reason
the Church Fathers, in commenting on the disturbing words of Psalm 137,
emphasize that we need to bash nascent sins, to nip them in the bud before they
flower into abhorrent, eradicable vices. Thus Dante bids us to ask: what sins
are we slumbering in, and what evil in our lives do we need to bash this
day?
2. The souls in Hell “have lost the good of intellect.” Man’s Last End is
the Beatific Vision, which, as Aquinas tells us, is an act of the intellect,
i.e. contemplation of God. “This is eternal life,” Jesus says “to know the one
true God.” Here the damned do not know God and do not see themselves rightly.
This is especially true in the case of Francesca, the damned lover who still
thinks she loves even though she clearly hates her husband (whom she cheated
on). As Christians we can ask a spiritual director or a spiritual friend for
advice on a matter that is plaguing us. We can put little resolutions into
practice every day to tame our desires and keep us from being tossed about on
the whirlwind of our passions like Francesca.
3. In Dante there is a special place in Hell for those who refuse to choose
between the Lord and some other god. Canto 3 is interesting because here—outside
of Hell—Dante creatively places “those sad souls whose works in life merited
neither praise nor infamy…who were for themselves alone, not rebels, and not
faithful to the Lord.” In this vestibule reside the people who knew the demands
of the Gospel and didn’t outright reject it, yet they were not brave enough to
stand up for what is right and take up their cross to follow Christ. How many
people today say that they are “personally” in favor of virtue and against evils
like abortion, but never really make up their minds to speak or do anything
about it! Dante’s third canto is a chilling reminder that we can’t sit on the
sidelines of this life if we want to be happy in the next. As for the “paltry
souls” in this canto, the punishment that fits their crime consists in the fact
that they are “pricked to motion now perpetually by flies and wasps” as they
“leer with envy at every other lot,” i.e. the lots of those who made a choice in
life for good or evil. Hence, although these “worthless wretches who had never
lived” are not technically in Hell, they wished they were in Hell, which Dante
wants us to consider as perhaps being even worse.
4. Charon, the ferryman of the dead in classical mythology, makes his
appearance in a similar role in the Comedy, as do many other figures of
antiquity. For me the lesson here is simple, and it is readily illustrated by
spending a few minutes in meditation upon his figure in Michelangelo’s portrayal
of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. The lesson is: have fear of God and
don’t do the sin you want to do, or else you have to meet this guy. Actually,
the reality behind Dante’s image of “crossing the melancholy shores of Acheron”
is infinitely worse, but the image is sufficient enough to give my untamed will
pause for at least a little while.
5. Our disordered passions are like a “hellish cyclone that can never
rest.” Canto five hauntingly reminds us to keep our desires subject to our
reason and not the other way around. The lustful punished here are not in the
depths of hell—their corruption is, in a certain sense, not as disgusting as the
corruption in those whose intellects and wills are perverted—yet they remain in
Hell nonetheless and have “no hope for rest…lashed and scourged in the black
air.” How easily do we today let ourselves be tossed about by our passions,
naively believing like Francesca that we ought to follow every whim of our
passions for love’s sake! We get divorced because we no longer feel the passion
of love as we once did, we have premarital sex because Cupid struck us with his
arrow and “couldn’t help it,” and we put ourselves in situations where we’re
doomed to fail—like Francesa and Paolo who claim to be “alone and innocent”
reading about Lancelot’s affair. We, too, all too often find ourselves caught in
situations where we say with Francesca, “That day we did not read another page.”
Behind Dante’s playful euphemism here stands a lesson for us all to live by. Let
us today avoid the near occasions of sin and ask God to help us see ourselves as
he sees us, so that we can ever more dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of
Hell.
I hope these insights are helpful to you. I'll share some more reflections
in later posts.
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