Dante’s Advent

For Advent I decided to read through Dante’s Divine Comedy. All of it. 

I’ve tried twice before.

The first time I got through Inferno, intrigued by the poet’s anatomy of human sin. I particularly liked his linkage of apparent opposites, as in Circle 4 where greed and miserliness turn out to be a matched pair. Accordingly, they find themselves—in Dante’s inimitable knack for making the punishment fit the crime—rolling huge stones along opposite grooves in a circle until they crash into each other, reverse course, to rinse and repeat for all eternity. 

So it goes for five more circles, and circles within circles, until Pilgrim and Guide are flushed out of the bottom of hell. That done, however, I couldn’t get started on Purgatorio. 

Getting Past Purgatory

When COVID descended I tried again, this time under the guidance of the Yale Open Course taught by the brilliant Giuseppe Mazzata. The depth and the detail this Sterling Professor supplied on Dante’s works and world are equally fascinating, revealing, and complex. I started devoting Sunday afternoons during the shutdown to take in his lectures. This time I made it halfway through Purgatorio before being. . . distracted? Or kind of disappointed that purgatory doesn’t really seem that big a deal compared to what came before? Maybe because, á la Satan in Paradise Lost, sin and evil are more dramatically compelling than virtue and happiness? Because I’ve long suspected that Calvinist heaven is kind of purgatorial? I don’t know.

On this third try I’m determined to get all the way to the end. I figure four cantos a day times this year’s 24 days of Advent and you wrap up Paradiso on Christmas day itself! Then too, Pilgrim’s trek in the Comedy takes exactly one week starting early Good Friday; one holy season deserves another. Finally, since the epic follows the Christian’s pursuit of perfection, it’s as religious as it comes, laying out a perfectly ordered cosmology along the way. 

Politics

But it’s also relentlessly political, reflecting Dante’s service in the city government of his beloved Florence and then his exile on trumped-up charges of corruption. That gave him time to sit down and write, and remember. We read of figures and events and issues from the endless conflict of Guelfs and Ghibellines, papacy and empire, that bedeviled (get it?) Italy for centuries, followed up by Whites vs. Blacks medieval Tuscan style. One wishes the poet could turn his verse to our four-century American version of the same.

I didn’t know about the political aspect the first time I entered Inferno, but that turned out to be the invisible draw. “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray/from the straight road and woke to find myself/alone in a dark wood.” So begins John Ciardi’s translation (1954), and so it reverberated in my gut that summer of 2003 when I first came upon the words. It was the summer of George W. Bush’s reckless invasion of Iraq and, helplessly, angrily watching America despoiling that land and itself in futile arrogance, I felt lost indeed, stranded in “so drear,/so rank, so arduous a wilderness.” Maybe Dante could be my Virgil to help me find a path out.

Lust, Wrath, Violence

And so it is again today under the looming shadow of the Orange One’s return. Four years more of his blather, his malice, his overweening pride, his abject gracelessness. Four more years of presidential speech that fulfills what novelist Mary McCarthy said of playwright Lillian Hellman: “every word she writes is false, including ‘and’ and ‘but.’”   

Where might Dante guide us to find Donald Trump and his minions? Perhaps in Circle 2, where lust is punished, or #5, devoted to the wrathful. But these lie in the upper reaches of hell where dwell malefactors of bad temper, erring by lack of self-control. That does not fit the president-elect who might breed chaos all around him but is coherent enough within his hard core of self-worship. 

How about Circle 7, where the violent thrash about? Those guilty of violence toward their neighbors (rather than towards themselves or God) founder forever in a river of boiling blood, pierced by arrows from their centaur guardians should they try to escape. Since sexual predators like Trump are more characterized by aggression than by lust, and since the wrath of his rhetoric threatens destruction at every turn, Circle 7 seems more fitting than 2 or 5.  

Lies and Treachery?

But why not the worst for the worst, you might ask, the ninth circle where are punished the greatest sinners in the Dantean scale—those who betray family, community, or nation. Whether the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was treason supervised by the callow television watcher in the White House seems to have escaped legal determination for now. But there can be no argument that the erosion of trust, the ripping apart of the bonds of affection and dependability which Dante sees as necessary for all relationships, has been exacerbated by the president-elect and will be more so in the years ahead. 

Yet as any number of critics have observed, Donald Trump did not start this erosion. In researching this post I picked up Hannah Arendt’s “Lying in Politics” (1971), as lying seems Trump’s most flagrant fault. Arendt’s essay, however, is a review of The Pentagon Papers which traced the long trail of deception down which presidents from Kennedy to Nixon had led the American people regarding the war on Vietnam.  

The editor of the recent reissue of Arendt’s essay, David Bromwich, notes that the same deception marked the U.S. war on Iraq under George W. Bush. In both cases, the authors note, it was leaders’ self-deception, combined of blithe arrogance and over-confident calculation, that drove their deception of others. 

A similar spirit marked the policies of “free market” globalization under Bush but also his predecessor and successor, Democrats both. That process has led the United States into the worst economic inequality in a century and left behind the white working class which has risen up to hail Trump as messiah. To cite Dante again, nothing besides falsely peddled wars has so eroded the trust and mutuality essential for a functioning nation. Trump has exacerbated division; he did not plant it. 

Fraud

Still, he is a genius at that trade, which might help us locate his Dantean destiny once for all. To me it lies in the eighth circle, devoted to the fraudulent. Dante gives plenty of detail here, subdividing the site into nine smaller circles (“valleys” or “pouches,” depending on your translation) and using no fewer than thirteen of Inferno’s thirty-three cantos to cover this hellscape. 

Here writhe the seducers and flatterers, the hypocrites and grafters. If the latter category includes any number of Trumps, not just the man himself, I spy his evangelical hangers-on in the valleys of soothsayers and false counselors—both old-time dispensationalists and new-fangled “apostolic” visionaries doling out false prophecies that deceive him as they have deceived themselves. 

For the president-elect’s own resting place I imagine Valley 7 in Circle 8, the doom of thieves. The animal-familiar of the thief according to Dante is the snake, and so this valley teems with them, biting their human victims without remorse, sometimes transmogrifying them into serpents themselves. Since Trump has seduced the nation with the ablest reptile brain to afflict it in half a century, this would seem a fitting destination.    

But what of the man who would be king? Elon Musk might well end up hopping from one of Circle 8’s valleys to another and might just escape the vicious guards Dante has supplied to tend them all by taking off on one of his beloved rocket ships to Mars. Not so fast, our poet will reply. Dante casts the absolute depth of hell, the ninth circle, as ice-bound, and the water that Musk needs to import to Mars as part of his survivalist scheme will surely freeze solid at the planet’s extremely cold temperatures. 

Symbolically, Dante is saying that ice forms from an absolute lack of human love and warmth. Maybe the punishment does fit the crime.