Dante's Message for Modernity Stephen Smith Late May or early June, the date is not known for certain, will mark the birthday of Dante Alighieri. His masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, written in 1307-8, is not only a literary and spiritual work, but an acute and biting survey of the social and political circumstances and personages of the time. In fact, in an age that lacked a professional press Dante selected himself to be the premier chronicler and analyst. His poetic analysis was designed not only to provide a guide to spiritual salvation but also to render a concrete and useful understanding of the political scene that would rouse others to practical action, and it still offers a vibrant and wise perspective on human and political life. In many ways, his purposes were not so different from the putative ones of contemporary journalists-"to provide," in Walter Lippman's words, "a picture of reality on which the citizen can act." Though written eight centuries ago, The Divine Comedy is relevant to each succeeding generation. "No one who reads The Divine Comedy," W.H. Auden wrote, "can resist playing the parlor game populating Heaven and Hell with their own acquaintances." So it seems irresistible to continue to wonder not only about the human and spiritual issues that Dante raises but also to wonder what Dante would have made of our contemporary political circumstances, and in particular of his political heirs, the current chroniclers of our collective moral and political life-the modern political press. Dante might have identified with the current denizens of Washington. Like some in today's press, he was both an observer and a participant. Aside from being a chronicler of his times, he was a political man involved in the political affairs of his day. In fact, he began The Divine Comedy after he was exiled from his native city of Florence and after being falsely accused of selling the privileges of his office. The Florence in which he worked and from which he was exiled was similar in many respects to contemporary Washington; it was a political and cultural center where social and political leaders gathered, and where standards and norms were set. It was also a hotbed of intrigue, rumor and machinations for power and status, and in his masterwork are names and deeds of real political figures and controversies of his time. Dante's vision of the chronicler's role in society still sets a standard for the contemporary press to aspire to. He believed that the only proper vocation of the chronicler was to illuminate the human and political truths that were centrally important to the moral life of the nation. One qualified for this role only by rigorous self-examination and application of the will towards goodness. "There is in you inborn, the power that counsels," the poet Virgil advises the pilgrim,"...this is the principle on which your merit may be judged, for it garners and winnows good and evil longings. Those reasoners who reached the roots of things learned of this, the bequest they left the world is ethics." The role of chronicler is so important for Dante because he believed, like America's founders, that intelligence and reason, properly applied, can guide soul and society towards an authentic, meaningful, ordered and satisfying destiny. Without guides to help explain social, political and moral reality, however, society and the individual are lost. Thus, the chronicler is the most centrally responsible moral agent of his time-a shaper of the moral life of civilization and an exemplar for future generations. In The Divine Comedy this interpreter of social, political and moral reality is represented by Virgil, then considered the greatest poet of classical antiquity, who wrote the Aeneid, a poem that defined the moral norms of two civilizations. It is this chronicler and poet who interprets reality and provides the picture on which the pilgrim can act to save himself. Dante's analysis of sin also emphasizes the moral responsibility of those who use language. He divides sin into three categories: concupiscence, malice and fraud. The first and comparatively least serious, concupiscence, has to do with the sins of the body and the failure to regulate ones own bodily appetites: gluttony, lust and sloth for example. The second category pertains to sins of malice. The last and most serious sins are the sins of the intellect-the sins of fraud. Dante is not easy on sinners in general; the slothful dwell in a fetid bog, for example, and the violent are immersed in a river of boiling blood. Yet he reserves his greatest enmity for the fraudulent, who suffer a range of punishments, including being ripped open so their entrails spill out. Thus he suggests that those who use language and the intellect are subject to particular responsibility and moral peril. Fraud is considered the most serious sin by Dante not only because he was victimized by false charges himself but because fraud frustrates the virtuous use of the intellect. Since virtuous thinking defines the person, disruption of it wrecks all of a person's functions-religious, social, civic. If one doesn't know or care what the truth is it becomes impossible to love the right things or to act as a responsible person or citizen, and society deteriorates. Ordered and just, personal and political life is thus wrecked by the false or irresponsible or self-serving portrayal of reality. For the ability to know and consequently to choose rightly is, according to Dante, the prerequisite for all authentic and productive human and political behavior. Consequently the gossips, and the sowers of scandal and discord, occupy the lowest and hottest places in hell, as do rumormongers and flatterers, who are another species of liar. They are much lower in hell than fornicators, murderers and thieves, for gossip, slander and the irresponsible, whimsically malicious use of language are not harmless forms of entertainment, but actions that pose the deepest and most profoundly damaging threat to the personal and collective moral life. This standard contrasts markedly with our own society, which appears to regard the use of political language primarily as a form of commerce and entertainment. It can be argued that it is far too late for a political culture which often revolves around radio and television talk shows, tabloid journalism, opinion and punditry, to heed the anachronistic and irrelevant standards of antiquity. To this Dante would perhaps reply that we ignore these standards at the peril of our own individual and collective salvation, and suggest that we are obligated to hope for more. As the Poet counsels the weary pilgrim in Purgatorio, "no soul is so lost that eternal love cannot return so long as hope shows something green." Stephen Smith lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

BookWire Home | BBR Home | Interviews | Search the BBR | Subscribe to the BBR! | Send Mail