WHY WE NEED THE COMMEDIA RIGHT NOW
“The Beatific Vision,” by John Flaxman.
I’ll start with a confession: I don’t like HBO. My wife and I are big fans of Matthew Rhys, however, and so we thought we’d give his new show Perry Mason a shot. We didn’t like it. From the first few minutes, in which a truly repulsive image of a murdered baby is displayed, through the too-predictable reliance on tired anti-hero tropes, the show never caught our interest.
Yet there’s also something deeper about why the show--and most of the network’s offerings--bother me. They have a fundamentally tragic outlook. They suggest, if not outright claim, that humankind is inevitably broken, that people can’t change, that violence and hatred and greed and lust are the seething energy that runs (and always has run) human society. That is a tragic outlook. A hellish one, in fact. But is it true?
It often seems so; and yet as we also look at our own present moment, and at the broad sweep of history, we see instances of beauty, kindness, and love, manifested through poetry, art, music, and, of course, the deep, deep reserves of Christian hope – wells from which we continue to drink, though it seems that we have to keep digging deeper to find their water.
Like many of Earth & Altar’s readers, I grew up in an evangelical tradition (Southern Baptist). And common to that experience is a privileging of heaven over and against the immanent frame of human existence: “This word is not my home, I’m just a passin’ through,” the gospel song says. This life is a proving ground for heaven, and, it seems at times, not much more than that.
At some point in my theological studies, though, I began to leave behind that privileging of the transcendent, finding myself asking questions like, “What about this world? Isn’t it of great worth and value to God?” “Doesn’t the Kingdom of God mean--or at least begin with--a present, earthly reality?”
Yet my pandemic experience has reframed my understanding yet again. I look at the lyrics to “This World is Not My Home” and it strikes me as not so misguided after all: “I can’t feel at home in this world anymore . . . Oh Lord, you know I have no friend like you . . . If heaven’s not my home, then Lord, what will I do?” Without the hope of a transcendent reality, above and beyond what we know in this vale of tears, what are we left with?
Without Christian hope in the present age, the temptation to despair is not only ever-present; it is ever-choosable. It is ubiquitous. It is low-hanging fruit.
In his little treatise “Hope,” Josef Pieper reminds us that despair is a “perverse anticipation of the nonfulfillment of hope,” (113) or a denial of our own desire for God; it is “to descend into hell” (Isidore of Seville), something which kills the soul (Augustine), the thing that “casts us into hell” (Chrysostom).
In perhaps the most imaginative and rich literary and theological exploration of Hell, Dante’s Inferno, the final line of the inscription over the Gate of Hell is “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate,” typically translated “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” (III.9). While first-year readers are often taught that this inscription represents the vindictive nature of a punitive and prescriptive Deity, I read the inscription as a lament of sorrow, a description of what it takes to make it to Hell in the first place: the loss of hope, the embrace of despair. All who arrive in Hell, according to Dante, have already abandoned hope, otherwise, they would not be there in the first place.
The Inferno is itself a city. Dante modeled his artistic and theological vision of Hell on his own town, the Florence of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Marred by political and religious violence, Florence was also the beloved city from which Dante had been exiled by the time he started writing the poem. It is also a city of the apocalypse, a city unmasked, a city in which Dante has dug below the surface of his social and political and religious realities in order to reveal the dark, chaotic, malevolent forces lurking underneath. Surely his own temptation to despair was ever-present: and so Dante-pilgrim’s journey becomes a journey away from the temptation to despair at the hellish existence of the present, an exhortation first to himself and then to his subsequent readers to eschatological hope.
Fascination with evil, coupled with the despair of the modern age has, unfortunately, fossilized Inferno as the most important section of the Commedia. It is almost exclusively the section taught in university survey courses, and even where the entirety of the poem is taught, Inferno often still gets the majority of time and attention. Yet the theological claim Dante makes in his Commedia is that the earthly hell-city is not the entirety of the Christian’s pilgrimage through life. It may make earthly existence more difficult, but it also provides the backdrop against which the cosmic drama of sin and purgation and redemption plays out.
In short, we need hope right now; and hope not as an escape from reality, but as a means of enabling us to bear reality; as a means of buttressing our spiritual vision and revealing the Mystery at the heart of Creation, the One who through Love turns the sun and all the other stars.
Why do I need the Commedia right now? Because I need Virgil’s continual exhortation to Dante: “do not fear” at the varied and pervasive evils unmasked in Hell – and now, in our own time, being unmasked daily. Because I need the ideal of spiritual kinship Dante evidently felt between himself and the communion of saints that had gone before. Because I need to be reminded by Beatrice, by way of Walker Percy, that there is often no difference between a good rhetorical and spiritually motivated “asskicking” and “edification” (The Moviegoer, Vintage International Edition, 187).
If Inferno is unmitigated despair, Purgatorio is the model of our present pilgrimage, and so I need it to remind me that the life of virtue within the hellish city matters, both for this earthly existence and for our preparation for the world of the life to come. As Dante-pilgrim is exhorted by those who are purging their acedia, I need to be awoken and encouraged: “Faster! Faster! To be slow in love is to lose time . . . strive on that grace may bloom again above” (Purgatorio XVIII.103-105).
Yet above all, I need the hope of Dante’s vision of Paradise. I need to be reminded that the world in its present form is passing away, even as God is renewing us inwardly day by day. Dante called the Paradiso “an uncharted sea,” and it is the very quality of his spiritual vision that gives hope, for despair often exists as a failure of the imagination. Hope calls us to imagine that which is by definition beyond our imagination, while at the same time affirming the “certain expectation of future glory” (Paradiso XXV.67-68).
I need to be blinded by the light of that future glory, to “star[e] fixed and motionless upon that vision” of hope, “ever more fervent to see in the act of seeing” (Paradiso, Canto XXXIII. 98-99). I must remember that hope itself is predicated on what Pieper calls the “status viatorus” nature of human existence--on the way, in between, seeing the city of the damned all around while I wait for the One who guarantees my citizenship in the heavenly city.
We are all pilgrims. We are all “on the way” to glory. Indeed, this world is not our home. If it were, there would be cause for despair. But we are being moved by the Love that turns the sun and the other stars. And that Love will bring us all home: “In His will is our peace. It is that sea to which all moves, all that Itself creates and Nature bears through all Eternity” (Paradiso 3.85-87).
