Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, Second Revised Edition

Certain writers linger at the borders of certain disciplines, and I always feel somewhat bad for neglecting them.  Thus in 2009 Michial and I read through Heidegger’s Being and Time, and in the summer of 2012 I finally took on Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives and Rhetoric of Motives.  This summer, Michial and I have agreed to try blogging through another book that seems often to show up as a predecessor-figure, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method.

If Heidegger shows up in the footnotes of existential and ethical philosophy books and Burke in rhetorical tomes, Gadamer is the once-deferred presence in books about interpretation, whether of Biblical texts or Shakespearean tragedies.  Named by Philip Cary (in a lecture that I attended) as one of the “conservative postmodernists” who pose a counter-tradition to Derrida and the “radical postmodernists”, Gadamer was someone I had wanted to read for some time, and in the spring, Michial and I decided that we’d both read and attempt to blog through this book this summer.  We will be using the edition of Gadamer from the link above, but our posts will take on roughly one section of the book at a time for those following along in other editions.

Thus I present the first section of Truth and Method.

Bildung and the Return of Rhetorical Education

Gadamer begins Truth and Method with an intellectual problem and turns to history to start to solve it.  The big question with which the book starts is whether the humanities and social sciences, or the “moral sciences” as John Stuart Mill called them (3), have their own particular logic or whether they would do best to appropriate and adopt the modes of reasoning with which the physical sciences make sense of particles and magnetic fields and astronomic motion.  Before getting too far at all Gadamer suggests that historicism, the situation of realities relative to their place in cultural and political development across time, should be the methodological signature of the human sciences in the same way that mechanism, the practice of treating reality as a series of machines of various complexity, governs the physical sciences (6).

For the humanist, then, one of the most helpful conceptual developments of modern philosophy is Hegel’s notion of Bildung.  Recoving the classical and medieval notion of human nature as dynamic from an Enlightenment tradition that tended to flatten the same, Hegel notes that the time-conditioned capacity to “break with the immediate and the natural” (12) and to entertain greater and greater degrees of abstraction from immediate sensory perception.  Bildung, like Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, develop with time and practice; nobody is born able to reason as well as that same person could do so after disciplined education.

For Hegel, then, the point of a Classical education, learning the texts and world of Homer and Plato and Ovid and Boethius, is not so much one of cultural literacy but precisely the opposite, the encounter of thoughts and worlds that are utterly unfamiliar:

To recognize one’s own in the alien, to become at home in it, is the basic movement of spirit, whose being consists only in returning to itself from what is other.  Hence all theoretical Bildung, even acquiring foreign languages and conceptual worlds, is merely the continuation of a process of Bildung that begins much earlier.  Every single individual who raises himself out of his natural being to the spiritual finds in the language, customs, and institutions of his people a pre-given body of material which, as in learning to speak, he has to make his own. (14)

(I’ll pause here to note that Weinsheimer’s and Marshall’s translation tends to use masculine pronouns for human-beings-in-general.  Although that is a stylistic move that I do not make in my own writing, I’m just going to transcribe quotations rather than littering them with [sic] notations.)

For such an enterprise, memory is not simply one mental faculty among many but constitutive of existence (16).  To remember not only the trees and food that one senses but the texts and lectures as well means that the moves that one makes as a human being are always moves in response to remembered reality, and the character of existence as commentary on memory (not unlike Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of a tradition) makes education not merely training and certainly not the collection of random facts for the sake of collecting facts but giving shape to future horizons of act.

Gadamer notes that, in the Italian Enlightenment figure of Giambattista Vico, the tradition of rhetorical phronesis (practical wisdom) as a counterpart to philosophical sophia (theoretical wisdom) continues the work of the Renaissance as a counterbalance to the strong separation between (natural) philosophy and (decorative) rhetoric that the Enlightenment, following the lead of Francis Bacon, tends to posit.  Thus in Vico’s vision of education the formation of memory, not the discovery of new facts, is at the core of education, and rhetoric itself represents not merely the “communication” of knowledge but a body of knowledge in its own right (21).  Thus Vico stands against Northern European models of education which would make all education “scientific” in a narrowly experimental/mathematical sense, insisting that Cicero’s project of vita memoriae, the training of memory through immersion in historical learning (23).  As opposed to German “scientific” histories, Vico holds on to the conviction that history is an inherently rhetorical, moral practice (24).

Sensus Communis and why Good Taste Matters

Two traditions, each mixing the ethical and the epistemological, follow in the wake of the German Enlightenment’s insistence upon separating the theoretical from the practical, the Italian tendency to keep them as parts of a larger pedagogical whole, and Hegel’s attempt to bring both of them into one grand system.  (Hegel did love some grand systems.)  On one hand Gadamer investigates the Scottish Enlightenment concept of Common Sense; on the other the Stoical (and by inheritance Romantic) tradition of sensus communis.

At first glance, the two seem to be merely translations, one for the other.  But in the Scottish tradition, Common Sense means that all material reality, and by extension the social relationships that derive their forms from material reality, stands as uniformly accessible to the five senses of all able human beings.  Thus the “sense” that one person gets is “common” to all.  This philosophy rises up largely as a response to the radical skepticism of David Hume, who noted that nothing beyond direct sensory impressions are really available to the mind, that a concept as simple as the cause-effect relationship between two bodies in motion (the most famous example being two balls on a pool table) is not actually itself apprehensible by sensory perception and thus is not the subject of real knowledge.  Thomas Reid, the most famous of the Common-Sense school, retorts in a witty essay that Hume himself only submitted his manuscript to the publisher because he believed that the event (submission of manuscript) would result in a predictable response (paycheck).  Thus, for Reid and all the heirs of Common Sense Realism, the whole of our “everyday” existence is, by and large, transparent, allowing us to see “through” such things as cause and effect and on into the content of what the causes and effects are.  Where people differ, either one party is mistaken (seeing a red billiard ball when the ball is actually green) or simply differ in opinion (red billiard balls are prettier than green billiard balls).

Against such a mentality Gadamer pits sensus communis, the idea that the worth of things is inherent just as much as their size, color, and other factors are.  However, since people have varying capacities to discern such goodness, the sensus communis tradition posits a couple realities about aesthetic taste (as opposed to the fifth sense that has to do with the tongue):

1. Taste is just as real a function of “perception” as seeing number, smelling sulfur, or hearing a bell ring.
2. Taste can be certain of the goodness or badness of a thing, even if reasons are not readily available to explain the evaluation (26).
3. Taste results from education; it is not an inherent capacity in undisciplined human beings.

Gadamer notes that Plato and Aristotle both basically agree that taste is something that develops, that the pleasures of the uneducated human being are of one sort and those of the educated person are of a different and better sort (40).  Although the German Enlightenment tradition, including its high point Kant, dismisses taste as the core of ethical philosophy (40), the Romantics recover it, differing from ethical sentimentalists in insisting, along with the ancients, that the proper moral dispositions are not the result of mere duration as a human being but become better- or worse-attuned to the truth of good and bad by means of good or bad education.

At this point, nearing the 1500-word mark, I’m going to hand it over to Michial, who in our next post will take on the next section of Truth and Method, which will expand on taste and explore the connections between taste and experience.

To get the first question out of the way, yes, I’ve been calling the last Cantos of Purgatory the Dante Apocalypse for several years now, and my term predates the recent fascination with various iterations of a “zombie apocalypse.”

With that out of the way, the final grand scene in Purgatory is a particular kind of purgation, one that seems to be for Dante only.  (There’s room for disagreement there–perhaps all the saved go through this last trial–but Statius, who is right there with the pilgrim as he undergoes the Beatrice-suffering, doesn’t seem to have his own analogous moment.)  In addition to facing his betrayal of Beatrice, Dante must behold and bring back to the living a vision of the end times, both events that lead up to the final fall of the Roman hierarchy and the fallout of the same.

The Parade of Divine Revelation

Beatrice does not simply show up at the end of Purgatory.  She makes an entrance.  Before the chariot (normally YHWH’s vehicle of choice) reveals her to Dante, a visual argument ensues that will make the following vision, without a doubt, the stuff of divine oracle.  The seven lamp-stands from Revelation lead the way, followed by the twenty-four elders form the same, then the four living creatures from Ezekiel.    Dante even pauses to note that the one place where the vision differs from Ezekiel, it agrees with Revelation, namely in the matter of how many wings the creatures have.

After them, Dante sees allegorical figures for the four cardinal virtues and three theological virtues, then figures corresponding to Paul and Luke and the other writers of the New Testament, with John of Patmos and seven other writers of the New Testament bringing up the rear.  So to summarize, whatever comes next is going to have behind it the force of philosophy, Scripture, apocalyptic disclosure, faith, hope, and love.  And with all that, in comes… Beatrice.

The Shame Unto Salvation

When Beatrice arrives, no paraphrase can really capture the language that the pilgrim musters to describe her glory.  Go read it.  But the purpose behind the big reveal is not merely that of aesthetic devotion (thought there’s some of that too): Dante must face his shame.  Having passed through the seven disordered loves that human beings have in common, Dante must face his own personal guilt (yes, Critical Theory people, I just used “guilt” and “shame” synonymously), that which has brought him so low.  She calls him out in front of the whole New Testament for betraying the vision of divine love that he received earlier, pursuing lechery and vain glory (and vainglory) rather than pursuing with diligence the higher ways that he could have had, even as a mortal.  For Beatrice this is not merely personal; it is a blasphemy against divine grace, and she will not let Dante cross the river Lethe until he has faced it one more time.  Again, the final trial seems particular to Dante, but I’d be glad to read comments to the contrary.

What’s even more odd about the scene is that, immediately after the public shame, Dante does undergo a Purgatorial baptism in the Lethe (another echo from Homer and Virgil), forgetting the evil that once distorted his life.  Beatrice even expresses amusement at his sudden change of demeanor, and when that deed is done, Beatrice’s venom is no more.  My hunch is that such a sequence of events might be Dante’s way of encouraging a plurality of readings, the sort that he mentions in his letter to Cangrande.  From that letter he describes four levels of interpretation that are necessary to understand the depths of the Commedia:

[Y] ou must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: `When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion’ (Douay-Rheims, Ps. 113.1-2). If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which is Latin means `other’ or `different’.

This moment rewards the same kind of polysemantic reading: in terms of the literal narrative, on its own terms, Dante experiences psychological disorientation as he remembers intensely, then forgets.  But morally, Dante might be pointing to the ethical experience that many seem to have upon conversion, a strong sense of personal guilt just before baptism (or whatever experience stands in for baptism in other kinds of conversion-rituals).  And allegorically, Beatrice seems to be standing in both for law and gospel, convicting Dante and proclaiming his release.  And anagocially (because why stop with three?), Dante might be living through the same tribulation-before-the-consummation that the Biblical apocalypse narrates so memorably.

Now if I had just made up those four interpretations, one could rightly accuse me of being an English major with too much time on my hands for interpretation, but given what Dante wrote about his own work, I don’t think I’m too far off here.

The Apocalypse

What Dante sees next convinces me that the human being Dante Allegheri likely thought that the world would end during his own lifetime or shortly after.  I don’t think that disqualifies him from being a great poet or philosopher, but it’s hard to deny that the expectation is there, especially when one reads the Purgatorio‘s apocalypse next to the passing mention of the Greyhound in the early Cantos of the Inferno.  What brings about the end of things is the corruption of the Church, and what replaces the hierarchy that’s also become a military force is one Empire with two swords, the Church with its Bishop of Rome and the Crown with its Emperor of Rome.

I used to be more critical of Dante’s imperialism, but as I’ve gotten older, I continue to disagree but don’t blame him nearly as much.  Trying to put myself in his position, I have to realize that the Papal corruption for Dante was no mere historical curiosity but a rift in the very fabric of salvation.  In Dante’s eyes, the world needs visible and clear moral authority, and when the Pope maintains a private army, acting like one more feuding prince (or, even worse, refuses to hold court in Rome, the seat of Peter), there’s an urgency to the situation that a Protestant like me can’t really imagine.  Moreover, as someone who’s living the last years of his life in exile because of feuds between Guelph-Ghibbeline and even more finely divided factional struggles, Dante certainly knows firsthand what happens when the effects of unstable political forces can be.

So in his vision, Dante imagines one Pope and one Emperor, spiritual and temporal power centralized but not combined, for the sake of peace in all the world.  In that respect Dante’s apocalypse is not the end of temporal power, as the book of Revelation seems to make it, so much as an establishment, by divine decree, of the truest justice possible on earth.  Thus is the vision that Dante brings back, and thus his expectations seem to stand.

Eunoe

When Dante has seen all of this, he enters into the Good-Mind river, and the memory of the goodness that accompanied him in life returns to him, intensified because not diluted by the bad memories.  Once again I marvel at the affirmation of human life: where some theologians would regard anything that human beings do as inherently worthless (or worse), Dante has earthly good follow the soul into Paradise.  When first I read Purgatory some ten years ago and more, if I remember right, I probably rejected this vision, but once again, as Dante has worked on me, reading after reading, I have to rejoice in his insistence that goodness is goodness, that our earthly minds, though clouded, still know what’s glorious when we see it.  It’s on that note that I wrap up this little journey through Dante, and the questions that I’d like to pose here at the end are these:

1. If you’re a CHP listener (and you should be if you’re not), you might know that David Grubbs claimed in a recent show that Martin Luther might end up agreeing with Dante more than I suspect.  Writing up this post, I still can’t reconcile someone who would regard the good deeds done without knowledge of God as inherently sinful with someone who would use the same deeds to lead the desires of the saved towards God.  Am I making too much of this?
2. Does Dante’s apocalypse strike you as a defect in an otherwise great poem, one more sign that it’s overrated, or something that adds to the grandeur?   Why?
3. Why, do you think, does Dante have a super-Purgatorial trial of memory?  Do the four levels of reading above make sense of or muddy further that episode?

General Introduction
- The end of the season
- On doctoral regalia
- Summer courses
- Slightly less minor internet celebrities
- Ongoing projects

Witches in the Bible
- Saul and the non-witch of Endor
- Necromancy
- Countercultural power
- Not suffering chanters
- Other Ancient Near Eastern prohibitions
- State-sponsored sorcery

Greco-Roman Witches
- Hecate, the goddess of witchcraft
- Outskirts of official society
- Medea the murderess
- Barely controllable feminine power
- Circe the sorceress
- The Golden Ass
- New Testament witches?

Macbeth’s Witches
- The ambiguity of their actions
- Satan or Delphi
- Shakespeare’s modifications of the classical world
- How sexualized are the hags?

Walpurginacht
- What is it?
- Its role in Faust, Pt. 1
- Farcical parade of ideas
- Black Sabbaths in pop culture

Witch Trials
- As seen by Arthur Miller
- Confessing to different things
- Feminine power without witchcraft
- Is the play any good?
- Other treatments of the witch trials

Fairy Tale Witches
- Filtered through Disney
- How we misremembered Snow White
- Sexuality and the Disney witches
- The Wizard of Oz
- Harry Potter’s non-impact

Wicca
- A reclaiming of the margin
- Nathan insults Wiccans
- Historicizing Wicca
- Other pop-cultural locations
- Blaming sociology

Witches in the Modern World
- Shall we burn Harry Potter?
- Technology as witchcraft
- The egomaniacal mad scientist
- Historicize, historicize, historicize
- Taking the shortcut

Rather than write a giant post about the last nine Cantos, I’m going to attempt two short ones, the last dealing mainly with Dante’s apocalypse.  If, as I plan, I can get these two posts knocked out this week, I’m going to plan on writing a brief series on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as I teach it for a summer course, then a brief series on Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue as I teach it.  But right now, Dante!

Where Babies Come From

I’ve said before that a great book, for my money, is a text that rewards multiple readings, and Dante once again proves to be just such a text.  In Canto 28, Dante asks Virgil why the shades among the Gluttonous look like they’re starving.  After all, Dante reasons, they aren’t really bodies, so their form should not suffer from deprivation of food.  Virgil’s response, the first few times I read the poem, struck me mainly as fodder for historicist inquiry: Dante lays out a basically Aristotelian theory of biological reproduction, adding a specifically Roman-Catholic understanding of the soul as something bestowed individually, by God, upon conception.  And even on that level, there’s enough of interest in Dante’s account to think on for some time: although there’s no sense of cell biology, nonetheless there’s a fairly sophisticated, integrated sense of how a human personality consists of animated body rather than some dualistic schema of ghost-possessing-machine.

This time around, though, I noticed something different, namely that Dante’s theology of desire is moving right along with the Thomist/Aristotelian theory of personhood.  The shades on the Terrace of the Gluttonous take their shape not because they need food (they’re not bodies, so they don’t) but because, when they died, their desire for food and drink overpowered their souls’ abilities to maintain a solid personhood.  In other words, the desires that we cultivate in the world of the living follow us to the afterlife, and for those on this terrace, those desires visibly distort the souls whose desires are thus disordered.  It’s a reminder, though a subtle one, that Purgatory, as Dante describes it, is always a gift, always something for the good of the saved sinner.  A person who went to Heaven with such out-of-whack loves would never be able to enjoy the eternal presence of God, and so divine grace gives them a chance to un-learn such things.

The same goes for those on the terrace of the lustful, of course: because people indulge their lust, in most cases, in secret places, those whose lusts are purged shout their own sins to the other groups of lustful souls.  So as they pass, one group shouts their hermaphroditic desire (Italian ermafrodito–the desire of man for woman or woman for man, a term borrowed no doubt from Plato’s Symposium) at those whose desire is homosexual, and vice versa.

Yes, there are gay people going to Heaven in the fourteenth century.

The public shame of shouting the exemplar-stories to other people makes up part of the discipline of this highest terrace; the other part is the consistent presence of searing heat.  No longer do these sinners worry that the fires within are going to have repercussions in a cool world–the world is hot enough for everyone involved.  With this final terrace of the disciplined sinners, Dante has taken in a full spectrum of disordered desire and seen the broad variety of ways that divine mercy would train the saved to desire properly.

Matelda, the Garden, and the Active Life

When Dante reaches the end of the seven terraces, he must pass through a wall of flame to move on.  As first-time reader several years ago I had no idea what was going on at this point, but when Dante emerges from the other side, neither his clothes nor his body damaged, he finds himself in the Garden of Eden.  The flames were the same ones that God had set at the boundary of the garden at the dawn of creation, and only because his sins had been purged and his desires rightly ordered could he enter in.

In the garden the pilgrim encounters a young woman, later identified as Matelda, who plays the allegorical foil to Beatrice.  Where Beatrice stands as the figure of contemplation, Matelda represents the active life.  This latter-day Mary-and-Martha pair reinforce, here at the end of Dante’s earthly journey, the goodness both of the work of cultivating the garden (and by extension all human work) and the goodness of intellectual meditation on divine things (and by extension all human intellectual life).  As Dante moves along inside the garden, he is fascinated by but never taken by lust for the young Matelda, another sign that his existence has entered into a different order from what he experienced among the living.  (One assumes that he went back to being prideful and such when he returned to his earthly exile, but I don’t see any discussion of that in the poem itself.)  Still, he wishes he could cross the river running through this earthly Paradise to join her in her work, a detail that rises in importance as Purgatorio ends.

Matelda explains to Dante that the river he can’t pass is none other than the river Lethe, where sinners forget the evils of their mortal existence.  When a sinner’s desire is for God alone, the memories of the earthly pain and suffering and guilt still remain, but the Lethe removes those so that the soul can enjoy its ascent into heavenly Paradise.  However, Dante still cannot enter into those waters, for reasons that will become apparent in the final stretch of Purgatorio.

I realize that the previous post in this series never did pose questions, and perhaps at some point I’ll backtrack and rectify that, but for the moment, here’s what I’ve got:

• To what extent does the Aristotelian biology of the poem make the vision of desires-shaping-souls hard to take seriously, and to what extent can a modern reader responsibly allegorize that passage for the sake of better imagining human existence in a historical moment shaped by cell biology?
• Allegorically speaking, how satisfying or disappointing is it that the Garden of Eden is a way-point on the soul’s path to heavenly Paradise?
• Am I overplaying the goodness of the active life as Dante seems to be imagining it, or is Matelda indeed a genuine vision of goodness?
• Am I the only one who gets to this point in the poem and hopes that there is indeed a Purgatory, because it’s just what a messed-up soul like mine needs so that I can enjoy Heaven?

The final installment of this series should be up tomorrow or Friday.  Thanks, all, for reading along!

It’s fitting that my Dante posts stalled out right when it was time to write about sloth, no?

Good Desire and Bad Desire

In Canto 18 Virgil continues his explanation of desire and its connection to divine justice and love.  The nature of human beings is to desire, Virgil begins, but in many cases something about that desire is contrary to the proper nature of the desire.  The paradox of human will is that, on the good side, our desires, properly ordered, are of a higher order of good than the desires of fire to rise, of stones to sink, and of plants to grow.  On the bad side, because our desires are contingent on our wills and acts moreso than those of flames and stones and plants, we have the capacity to warp our own desires, turning them bad in the ways that Virgil described in Canto 17.

Thus Dante’s Virgil explains, in terms at once concise and compelling, just what it means to be a rational animal: because our desires, unlike those of other animals, take their shape not only from instinct but also from the disciplines and bad habits of the courses of our lives, human beings alone among the animals have the capacity truly to enjoy the presence of God, but we also have need (where other animals have no need) to have our desires disciplined, either by the influence of kings and teachers while we live; or by Purgatory afterwards.

As I’ve said before, whether one “believes in Purgatory” or not, Dante’s vision has an undeniable beauty to it.  Purgatory is necessary because of the particular brokenness of human nature, and the particular brokenness of human nature happens because of the unique goodness of humanity.  Placed next to dualistic philosophies, which relativize our bodily existence to the point where they have nothing to do with our souls; and materialistic philosophies, in which the soul is some epiphenomenon of brain chemistry, or even a lie that’s mapped onto the flat assertion of biological change, there’s a richness to a Christian-humanist philosophy like Dante’s that makes the moral existence of humanity not only intelligible but beautiful.

Sloth, Avarice, and Gluttony

Purgatory continues to be a place where desires get disciplined and educated in the fourth, fifth, and sixth terraces, each terrace’s mode of storytelling and bodily punishment fitting the particular nature of each deadly vice:

• The slothful must tell their own stories (since they must cultivate a sufficiently intense desire for God, it makes some sense to jump start it by making them tell their own stories), and they spend their time in Purgatory running from here to there, not waiting around for something to impress them before they move.  The stories have to do with those who did not desire good things (the most amusing being the Hebrews after the Exodus, who took forty years to get to the promised land) and those who sought out good news with great vigor (most notably Mary, who went immediately to Elizabeth to share news of their miraculous pregnancies).
• The avaricious must share their stories with each other (since they lived as people who would not share), and their stories are about both generosity and voluntary poverty on the good side, and their vice-stories have to do both with hoarding and with reckless spending.
• The gluttonous hear their stories issuing forth from food they’re not allowed to eat, and their stories have to do with those who denied themselves and those who destroyed themselves with indulgence, both of food and of wine.

I won’t go into detail here, certainly to avoid becoming a study site for those who don’t actually read their assignments in college but even more because, as perhaps the chief architectural poem in the medieval tradition, the Commedia sets up structures that allow a careful reader simply to note the stories and disciplines present and move on.  Once Virgil has explained how everything fits together, there’s no need to repeat the connections between the media and the stories and the souls educated by both.  Instead, Virgil and Dante and other characters can devote the space remaining in the poem to other matters, like how long people spend in Purgatory.

Out of Purgatory

The first time I ever read the whole Commedia (I read Inferno a couple times before then), this is what surprised me most about Dante’s vision, and in the ensuing years, it’s become easily the most intellectually satisfying part of Purgatory.  George Bernard Shaw picked this up, and C.S. Lewis followed Shaw, and I can only tip my hat to those two twentieth-century masters for their good taste.

Before they exit the terrace of the Avaricious, Dante and Virgil encounter a mysterious figure, a shade who later identifies himself as Statius, the Silver-Age Roman poet.  As they converse, Dante and Virgil come to realize that Statius, after a long spell among the Prideful and then five hundred years among the Spendthrifts (a division of the Avaricious), Statius has risen and will be departing Purgatory for Paradise.  When Virgil asks about the Purgatory-shaking celebration that happened just before he started his new climb, Statius explains the logic that governs one’s stay on the Mount:

Up here the mountain trembles when some soul

feels itself pure enough to stand erect

or start at once to climb–then, comes the shout.

The will to rise, alone, proves purity:

once freed, it takes possession of the soul

and wills the soul to change its company.

I willed to climb before, but teh desire

High Justice set against it, inspired it

to wish to suffer–as once it wished to sin.

And I, who for five hundred years and more,

have lain here in my pain, felt only now

will free to raise me to a higher sill. (Purgatory 21.58-69)

Had I read that passage as a younger man, I would have balked: who, I would have asked, would really desire to be punished more than he desired to rise to Heaven?  As the years have passed the spiritual truth here has become more apparent: the lives that we lead here on earth, both the parts that we choose and the parts to which we’re victims, leaves us deeply wounded, and Dante’s vision of reality includes a God gracious enough to heal those wounds rather than pretending they don’t matter.  If Purgatory were mere “jail time,” enforced at the behest of the grand Magistrate in the sky, I would probably reject Dante’s vision out of hand (as, for instance, I reject most sixteenth-century preaching on Purgatory that I’ve read).  But since Dante’s vision is rooted not in punishment but in the sort of love that only the Almighty can exercise, it remains a genuinely compelling vision, and I’ll say here what I say when I teach this poem to evangelical undergraduates: if Purgatory is what Dante says it is, I don’t reckon I’d mind going.

I’m not sure whether I’ll do one more post to finish out the series or whether I’ll split the last nine Cantos into two posts, but either way I should have the last posts on the poem up soon.

General Introduction
- Yet more weather talk
- Light and heavy episodes
- Books for aspiring seminarians
- Listener feedback

Historical Background
- The dedicatory epistle
- Flattering the pope
- Attacking the Holy See
- Early and late Luther
- Knowing your audience
- Is Luther being ironic?

Faith and Works
- The indulgence system
- External and internal
- Faith as the gift of acceptance
- The purpose of the Law
- Does he ever really explain faith?
- Nathan complicates the Law

Luther as Preacher
- Christ is not the moral exemplar
- Don’t abandon the Gospel
- Womanish absurdities
- Nietzsche’s Jesus
- Promoting faith
- Only love can change a heart
- The influence on Philip Cary

Works and Goodness
- Whence virtue ethics?
- Environment again
- Why he’s not an antinomian
- What’s done without faith is sin
- Can habits bring faith?

Subject to All and None
- Inner and outer man
- Fighting antinomianism
- Where virtue enters
- A false dichotomy?
- Luther’s glorious ethics

Other Things
- Luther and ritual
- The kingdom of God is at hand
- Free to do good

General Introduction
- More weather talk
- Feed problems

Not Etymology but History
- David turns to the OED
- The Enlightenment
- Byron’s parody
- Intellectual vs. physical
- Other terms and overlaps

Intellectual, Scholar, Academic, Man of Letters
- Defined against one another
- Ranges of interests
- Career tracks
- Levels of specialization
- Rhetorical performances
- What to do with scientists?

“The Twilight of the Intellectuals”
- None of us have read the book it’s reviewing
- Political ideologies
- Practical considerations
- Outside the system
- Intellectual and prophet
- Capitalism and ideology
- The intellectual’s pragmatic value
- The New Left and activism
- Whence conservative intellectuals?

Christian Intellectuals
- How to stand outside and affirm doctrines?
- Oppositional disciplines
- How many kinds of intellectuals?
- Strangers and aliens
- David goes Van Til
- Leaning or standing
- A troubled faith

We Advocate
- Augustine as outsider
- Driven nuts by David Brooks
- Spanning the Academy and the street
- Sorry, First Things

The Architecture of Purgatory

This section of Cantos begins to reveal connections between the terraces, both in terms of the media through which the tragic and exemplary stories come to the saved and in terms of the discipline of desire that happens along the way.

• To envy another human being means to look on that person’s fortune, good or bad, and fall victim to one’s own disordered desires.  So in Purgatory, the envious no longer face that temptation, instead hearing together those stories (and thus picturing by means of their own faculties of imagination) the stories that shape the soul, and their eyes are forced shut so that they must feel their neighbors’ presence rather than beholding them in abstraction.
• To fall victim to consuming wrath means to live inside the network of your own tightening muscles, boiling blood, and furrowed brow, and so Purgatory educates the wrathful with ecstatic visions, stories which necessarily take the soul out of its own narrowing world.  The thick smoke on the terrace means that the sinners do not have the capacity to make an intentional rush at the neighbor and must actually listen to what other people say.

In all three of the lowest terraces, since the vices involve bad will towards the neighbor, the discipline involves something that restrains the shade in the presence of the neighbor.  The reasons for that kind of discipline don’t get stated directly until Virgil speaks his discourse on the nature of sin (that’ll be the next post), but hints already appear in Canto 16, when Marco the Lombard teaches the Pilgrim about free will:

Men, therefore, needed the restraint of laws,

needed a ruler able to at least

discern the towers of the True city. True,

the laws are there, but who enforces them?

No one.  The shepherd who is leading you

can chew the cud but lacks the cloven hoof. (16.94-99)

Following Plato’s lead in the Republic, Dante names the role of the ruler as restrainer, an agent that allows the citizen “to discern” what is good and what is harmful by means of habituation and training should they lack the natural ability to do the same.  That focus also informs the grand discussion, in Canto 16, about why the Pope should forsake temporal power for the sake of the world.  If the Pope, who should be exercising the moral authority that can even call the powerful to account, is instead acting himself as a petty warlord, then the moral force of the Bishop of Rome diminishes to the point that the world can go badly and leave the blame rightly at the feet of its rulers.

These parts of the Purgatory do some good for me, especially since I’ve not written about Dante in a while: they remind me that his imperialism, like just about everything else in his system, is worked our philosophically before I ever get there.  His advocacy for a renewed Roman Empire, one which wields the sword to restrain rather than to plunder, flows from deliberation, not merely preference.  As one of his readers, I’m perfectly free to take issue with his arguments, but Dante’s challenge is always to articulate those arguments, not merely to render political difference a matter of consumer choice.

The Discourse on Sin

The best part of Canto 17, though, comes after the explanations of Envy’s workings, when Dante and Virgil wait for the sun to rise.  In those moments when they cannot rise, the great Roman poet explains to Dante the divisions between the terraces of Purgatory and by extension the reasons for each sinner’s particular fate there.  Love is at the root of all things in the divine economy, and Purgatory is no exception.  The divisions among the saved are based on the ways that they miss the mark of perfect love:

• Some love glory at the expense of the neighbor’s dignity (Pride)
• Some love relative goodness and rejoice at the neighbor’s relatively bad fortune (Envy)
• Some love their own honor and lash out at the neighbors who wrong them (Wrath)

Those are the vices of ill-will, the ones turned against a neighbor and thus the most severely disciplined.  Beyond their circle, Virgil notes, there will be some whose desire for God does not spur them to following Jesus:

• Some love inadequately and need spurred to greater desire (Sloth)

Virgil does not spell out the last three, but given what he does tell Dante, they’re not hard to deduce at this point:

• Some love wealth and material goods in ways that harm the soul (Avarice)
• Some love food and drink in ways that harm the soul (Gluttony)
• Some love sex in ways that harm the soul (Lust)

Because the expansion on these ideas happens in Canto 18, I’m going to cut this post short, especially given that our Facebook readers just got a mess of posts dumped at their feet, but I will note, for those reading along, that our next post will deal with Cantos 18-21.

General Introduction
- Should we talk about the weather?
- Listener feedback
- The Purgatory Experiment

Poe Myths
- Marrying his cousin
- Drug addiction
- Alcoholism
- Death
- A self-portrait

Magazine Culture
- Literary centers
- A broad audience
- Self-fashioning through scandal
- Poe as mercenary
- Poe as editor

Poe’s Narrators
- “I’m not crazy”
- The unreliable narrator
- How much third-person?
- Found footage

Poe’s Poetry
- In love with their own sound
- Nathan reads “The Bells”
- Scanning Poe
- Is Poe being sarcastic?
- Proto-Dada

Poe Movies
- Why the cultural fascination?
- The Vincent Price series
- Cusack-as-Poe
- The Following
- The other Raven

Bad Student Readings
- Moralism
- Autobiography
- Poe over Donne
- Does the emperor have clothes?
- Liking things for the wrong reason

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 21 April 2013 (4th Sunday of Easter, Year C)

Acts 9:36-43  •  Psalm 23  •  Revelation 7:9-17  •  John 10:22-30

I’ve taught Revelation, in its entirety, four times in the last six years.  Ten years ago, I would have said that anyone willing to do that is nuts.

So it goes.

This week’s reading, though, is one of those that reminds me why I so love the Apocalypse.  With a bit of historical engagement and an ear for Psalmic utterance, Revelation 7 presents a beautiful vision of the Kingdom of God.  What sets up verses 9-17, of course, is one of Revelation’s (oft-misread) “hearing and seeing” pairs: a voice numbers those sealed with the mark of the Lamb, and the numbers and boundaries are very clear and very small: a total number of people less than half the population of Rome, and drawn only from the original twelve tribes of Jacob (without even any consideration for the sub-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh), the sort of saved-remnant that one might expect in the documents of Qumran.

But when John looks for himself in 9:9, the vision of the Kingdom overwhelms his mind: before him is no minuscule remnant but a multitude that nobody can count, the vast plenitude of the saved that YHWH promised to Abraham in Genesis and that Isaiah prophesied in the opening chapters of his book.  The Kingdom, as the vision makes clear to John, exceeds the imagination of all who count numbers, not only the territorial anxieties of those who would put the goodness of God within set boundaries.  In the hands of the saved are palm branches, signs both of the folly of Palm Sunday (where the disciples of Jesus welcomed the Christ as a Roman conqueror) and the promise of the Torah brought to fullness (as in Leviticus 23, in which the celebration is not a general’s coming in but a city’s going out), and their white robes indicate that the stains of the world’s wickedness no longer trouble them.

The song they sing sounds religious to the modern ear but would no doubt have been a song of a kingdom when those first-century Christians heard it: salvation, which Caesar’s armies proclaimed, belongs not to Caesar but to God and to the Lamb.  The healing of the world happens not when the peoples all come to give honor and glory to a man in a city but to God in the Heavens.  And the agent of that Kingdom is no agent at all but one who passively became the victim of violence, one could almost say a Christ who undergoes a passion.  The strong network of reversals in this song of the slaughtered king sometimes falls on deaf ears, largely because we’ve lost the referents, but in its own moment, this song, revealed to the faithful through a read text, is the herald not merely of a new king but of a kingdom beyond the imagination of Empire.

That the LORD is a shepherd is still well-known to modern Christians; if anything, Psalm 23 has risen to a prominence that it simply did not enjoy a thousand years ago.  But the ancient image of king as shepherd, the one that would have given Psalm 23 its force, sometimes gets forgotten when our main images of shepherds come from children’s Christmas pageants (Charlie Brown’s and others’).  What the Apocalypse sets before the faithful is nothing less than a revolution: this is no mere regime change but a new way of thinking about kings, not simply a removal of oppression but a way of imagining the future in which oppression is no longer categorically possible.

May our prayers be for the true Kingdom to come, and may God’s will, as alien as that might be, come to pass on earth as it is in Heaven.