Posts Tagged Dante

General Introduction
- Welcome to November, from October
- Michial’s one-man war on portmanteaux
- Buy our mugs! (I mean energy, not internet—we record early in the morning)
- Listener mail from a stranger
- Mad Dog! Mad Dog! Mad Dog!
- English accents
- What’s on the web log?

Defining the Apocalyptic
- Apocalyptic and prophetic
- The end as the beginning
- Post-apocalyptic as the really important thing
- Refuting Mad Max
- The prophetic voice and the unveiling

Biblical Apocalypse
- Prophecy or apocalypse?
- And apocryphal apocalypse
- Visionary, narrative, and eschatological
- Christ or violence

Apocalypse in the Ancient Near East
- Prophecy but not apocalypse
- Cyclical time
- The importance of monotheism
- Cyrus plays the system
- Zoroastrian apocalypse

Literary Apocalypses
- Dante gets the date wrong
- Ragnarok kills off the gods
- Giving Norse mythology a happy ending
- The Red Crosse Knight in the House of Holiness
- Dem bones rise up against Henry V
- Eliot and Yeats and how we misread them
- The modern American apocalyptic novel

Songs About the End of the World
- “The End”
- “Gimme Shelter”
- “Four Winds”

Final Thoughts
- Don’t get too hung up on interpretation
- Pay attention to literary form
- What comes after the end? . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ciuba, Gary. Walker Percy: Books of Revelations. Athens, GA: 1991.

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998.

Dante. Purgatory. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 1985.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems, 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991.

Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged. New York: Henry Holt, 1969.

Milosz, Czeslaw. New and Collected Poems, 1931-2001. New York: Ecco, 2003.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin, 1978.

Percy, Walker. The Last Gentleman. New York: Picador, 1999.

—. Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World. New York: Picador, 1999.

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods. Trans. A.S. Byatt. New York: Grove Press, 2012.

Shakespeare, William. King Henry V. London: Arden, 1995.

Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2011.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Longman, 2006.

Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Trans. Jesse L. Byock. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Yeats, W.B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York: Scribner, 1996.

General Introduction
- Flowin’ like a bottle of Drano
- What’s on the blog?
- A listener vastly overestimates us

Who Is Prometheus?
- Deflating Gilmour’s balloon
- Zeus as new god on the block
- Sympathy for Prometheus

Zeus’s Role in the Play
- Bodily absent, present via agents
- Translating Zeus’s helpers
- (Browning’s translation comes from 1833)
- Descriptions of Zeus
- Zeus’s justice
- Divine ambiguities
- The suffering of Io

Divine Suffering and the Dionysian Festival
- Prometheus as crucified god
- The ambiguities of the festival itself
- Dionysus as suffering god and cause of suffering
- Improper worship
- Why Hephaestus limps

Bad Fortune as a Character
- Lady Fortune knocks some sense into Boethius
- The sublunary world
- Randomness, not malice
- Wyrd fortune
- Wheel! Of! Fortune!

Milton’s Prometheus
- Selfishness
- Satan’s public and private voices
- Milton critics as grumpy Muppets
- Ancient patterns of heroism

Unbinding Prometheus
- Shelley’s dissatisfaction
- The information Prometheus has on Zeus
- How fan fiction “corrects” the ending
- Appealing beyond Zeus
- Why use the Roman names?

The Nü Atheists: Stealing Fire?
- Why theodicy and anti-theodicy is nothing new
- Bart Ehrman’s immense self-satisfaction
- Higher justice and the Catholic Church
- Why Ivan Karamazov is a better Prometheus
- Dawkins and the bigger questions
- Is Prometheus an atheist?

Prometheus Bound and the Modern Christian
- The play as a corrective to syncretism
- Mythology as the good dreams of man
- The punishment for pity
- Shattering the unified “Greek mindset”
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aeschylus. Aeschylus II: The Suppliant Maidens and the Persians, Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1992.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Dante. Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Susan McReynolds Oddo. New York: Norton, 2011.

Ehrman, Bart. God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. New York: HarperOne, 2008.

Euripides. Euripides V: Electra, The Phoenician Women, The Bacchae. Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1969.

Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2009.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Prometheus Unbound. London: Black Box Press, 2007.

General Introduction
- Looking for the Yeti
- What’s on the blog?
- The review is coming tomorrow!
- Boethius Battlefield writes in
- An unenthusiastic obituary

A Primer on Greek Drama
- Civic festival
- Dionysian competition
- Millennia of theorizing
- Chorus and individuated characters
- The world’s most tedious arthouse film

A Primer on Sophocles
- Popularity and fame
- The Theban trilogy
- The lost plays of Sophocles
- The third person

Aristotle Reads Oedipus
- What makes tragedy good for the city?
- Freytag’s Triangle
- Breaking up the action
- How readings limit our readings
- Why Oedipus is like IKEA

David and Nathan and Oedipus and Tiresias
- Minimizing sin at the expense of the polis
- Why Oedipus is not a particularly evil king
- Who suffers with whom?
- On death and exile
- What is Oedipus condemned for?
- Tragic flaw or great mistake?

I’m A-Freud of That Play!
- How does Freud fare as a reader of Sophocles?
- Skipping centuries of critics
- De-mythologizing (but not what you think)
- Human desires
- Stunted development
- The connection to dreams

Antigone
- Who’s the tragic hero here?
- Public and private virtues
- To whom your obligation?
- Why Creon is not a monster
- Antigone as feminist icon
- Sophocles and civil disobedience

The Takeaway
- What does Sophocles do well?
- Why should Christians read him?
- The rebirth of tragedy
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. Trans. Gerald Else. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1967.

Dante. Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. New York: Penguin, 2002.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 2010.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches. Ed. James M. Washington. New York: Harper, 1990.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1989.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Plato. The Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic, 1991.

Sophocles. The Three Theban Plays: Antigone; Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2000.

General Introduction
-  What’s wrong with the blog?
-  Our shame in the face of The Pietist Schoolman
-  The perils of Internet celebrity
-  Working on our Night Cheese

The History of the Book
-  Should you buy it?
-  What Nathan argues
-  How it got published

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum
-  Nested and side narratives
-  Who’s responsible for the Fall?
-  Feminism under the radar
-  Lanyer’s (lack of) influence

The Sequel to Paradise Lost
-  The Temple of Doom?
-  A series of stern lectures
-  Milton vs. Nicene Trinitarian Orthodoxy
-  The creeds and the Scriptures

Theological Dramatics
-  A quick correction
-  The believing writer and the dramatic text
-  The writer within the Body of Christ

Other Sources
-  “The Dream of the Rood”
-  Active martyrdom
-  The lessons of “The Pearl”
-  The heretical Christ stories of recent centuries
-  Taking stock of Dante

The Theologian and the Literary Critic
-  Where do they intersect?
-  The riddle of Stanley Fish
-  Theological implications of literary criticism
-  Can this work outside of New Historicism?
-  The critical mirror

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

“The Dream of the Rood.” The First Poems in English. Ed. Michael Alexander. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. How Milton Works. Cambridge: Belknap, 2003.

—. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

—. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Gilmour, Nathan. Theological Dramatics: Two Christological Case Studies. Lambert, 2011.

Lanyer, Aemelia. The Poems of Aemelia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.

Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. New York: Harper, 2009.

Mailer, Norman. The Gospel According to the Son: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1999.

Marsden, George. The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2009.

Pullman, Philip. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.  Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011.

Saramago, José. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York: Mariner, 1994.

General Introduction
- Sweaty technology
- In which we creep up on fifty
- Name-dropping with Nathan Gilmour
- Giving the listeners what they want

How English Departments Used to Work
- The rise and fall of rhetoric
- Charles Eliot changes everything
- Authors and periods and other literary matters
- The populist origins of Freshman Comp
- The pyramid scheme in English graduate programs
- Bad edit alert

Are Things Changing for Rhetoric?
- Weaver’s attack on the scientific man
- Self-expression and utter subjectivity
- The return of Gorgias
- The undervalued and purposeless rhetoric department

Language Is Sermonic
- The supreme confidence of the postwar generation
- The human being as composite
- Facts and opinions
- The movement of language
- Students’ disbelief in rhetoric

Classical Topics
- Abraham Lincoln defines humanity
- Definitions and essential reality
- Unwitting Weaverians
- Cause, effect, and circumstance
- Playing with logical fallacies
- Weaver’s mystical analogies

Arguments from Authority
- Grubbs vs. Weaver
- Why do students resist professional authority?
- And yes, we know we act like polymaths, too
- Wikipedia and authority
- Foucault hits pop culture
- A gratuitous shot at Brian McLaren
- Mainline bureaucracy

Taking It to Class
- Break down the silo
- Essays are persuasive
- And question your other classes
- Refining fallacies through topics
- Excellence in rhetoric

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cicero. The Nature of the Gods. Trans. Horace C.P. MacGregor. New York: Penguin, 1972.

Dante. Paradise. Trans. Dorothy Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1962.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.” On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. New York: Harper, 2010.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.

Thomas Aquinas. A Shorter Summa. Ed. Peter Kreeft. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1993.

Season four begins with a bang!

General Introduction
- Welcome to Season 4
- David remains transient
- Michial and his dissertation
- That .01 episode from December
- What’s on the blog?
- The award we won

The Origins of This Episode
- Filling in the holes left by the CWC
- And of New Mexico? And of oversized cups of soda?

Dante ‘n’ Petrarch
- Coming to terms with classical myth
- Dante’s refusal to allegorize or to forgive the pagans
- On Limbo
- Raiding Egypt for gold
- Pardon our lacuna
- Dante’s real grief over Virgil’s departure
- Petrarch as Platonist and emo kid
- Medieval courtly love
- The universalizing tendency and the feminist objection
- Junior-high love

Renaissance Self-Understanding
- De-emphasis of the classical world in the Middle Ages
- Earlier renaissances
- Ad fontes and the Reformation
- A new kind of Dark Ages
- David Grubbs deconstructs the Renaissance
- Cultural translation and the Medieval Era
- Was the Renaissance in historical bad faith?
- How to enrage your Medievalist

Italian Renaissance Art
- The Vanishing Point
- The reduction of symbolism
- Community reality
- Michelangelo’s pagan David
- Anatomy vs. iconography
- The camera and the return to pre-Renaissance painting
- Renaissance Moses for the win
- Mona Lisa and moaning Petrarch

The Patronage System
- What does it mean to “sell out”?
- How capitalism killed patronage
- The legacy of the Medici
- The Romantic influence

The Courtier Meets the Knight Errant
- Podcast editing and sprezzatura
- Keeping the veil closed
- Learning from the wise and never letting them see you sweat

Machiavelli and Modern Politics
- The Prince’s far-ranging influence
- Underlying democratic Machiavellianism
- Distrust of the masses
- Kissinger and Nixon
- Machiavelli and the business world
- Is The Prince satire? Does it matter?
- The Discourses on Livy examine religion and the State

What Else?
- Effusive praise for the Decameron
- Why the Renaissance came before the Middle Ages
- Taking Pico della Mirandola allegorically
- Pushing the edge of humanism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blake, William. “The Chimney Sweeper.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 1979. 25-26.

—. “London.” Blake’s Poetry and Designs. Ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant. New York: Norton, 1979. 53.

Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Decameron. Trans. G.H. McWilliam. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. Arthur D. Imerti. Lincoln, Neb.: Bison, 2004.

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. New York: Norton, 2002.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Troilus and Criseyde. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State UP, 2000.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

—. La Vita Nuova. Trans. Barbara Reynolds. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. Discourses on Livy. Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.

—. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Petrarch. The Canzioniere. Trans. Mark Musa and Barbara Manfredi. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1999.

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. On the Dignity of Man. New York: Hackett, 1998.

Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Shakespeare, William. The Sonnets. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. London: Arden, 1997.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Dante 2010: Purgatorio

Dante 2010: Inferno

Dante 2009: Paradiso

Dante 2009: Purgatorio

Dante 2009: Inferno

Dante 2008: Paradiso

Dante 2008: Purgatorio

Dante 2008: Inferno

I’ve taken longer than I would have liked to finish my Dante posts this year, but I suppose that’s life.  I’m certain I’ll read the Comedy next summer, and when I do, I’m sure I’ll have things to write about then, and perhaps I’ll be a bit closer to speedy about it.

This year what struck me most about the third and most difficult Canticle of the Comedy is just how much of it Dante dedicates to declaring impossible the task of writing poetry about Heaven.  As Dante rises into the heavenly realms, and later as Dante comes to the sphere of fixed stars, and later still as Dante becomes aware of the Empyrean as the full reality of the Heavenly court, and finally as Dante contemplates God’s self, Dante’s own soul changes, allowing him greater and clearer and more profound apprehension of realities beyond the scope of mortal language, but the problem with transcending mortal language is that he’s still got a poem to write, and that just makes the whole enterprise difficult.

When Dante does manage to write some poetry, as usual, the moves that he makes provoke me to thought more than most written texts manage to.  Dante’s basic definition of Paradise, that which makes Heaven Heaven for those in Heaven, is a hierarchical scheme.  At first glance even Dante, imperialist though he is, entertains the question whether those souls who receive a lesser share of divine bliss would be within their right to entertain a bit of resentment.  Beatrice assures him, though, that the hierarchy is not a coercive hierarchy in which the powerful keep down the powerless through violence and fear of violence.  Instead, the souls receive from the bounty of divine love precisely as much of that divine love as they desire, so that the magnitude of desire for God and the share of God’s outpouring are perfectly matched in every case.  So those souls who are theologically and philosophically inclined bask in a great share of divine love, those who ruled with justice with more still, and mystic contemplatives even more.  The schema is not unlike Plato’s ideal city in the Republic: although it seems monstrous at first glance, there is a logic internal to the scheme that is somehow compelling in its own terms.

Part of the Paradiso that always bugged me a bit (you’ll see why in a moment) is the elevation of generals and warriors over theologians in Dante’s scheme.  Although the Dominicans (including Thomas) and Franciscans enjoy eternal contemplation of the Good, the warriors like Orlando and Gottfried and Dante’s own ancestor Cacciguada are even more honored in Heaven.  This year, for the first time, I started to realize that what’s important for Dante is not so much the willingness to kill as the active life–in fact, the progression from the Sun to Mars to Jupiter to Saturn forms a chiasmus of sorts that encompasses active and contemplative Christian pursuits, and all of those take some share of the Kingdom in Dante’s mind.  I also granted for the first time that the Anabaptists’ elevation of martyrs to the exemplars of faithfulness is at least somewhat akin to Dante’s of the warriors.  That’s not to say that they’re identical (I do still think myself a Hauerwasian), but I can appreciate the system a little better now.

Just as Dante’s spherical earth is always the first place I go when people try to tell me that Christopher Columbus regarded the world as round in the face of unanimous flat-earthism, I’ve come to realize that Dante, in a way, has a vision of the cosmos that is not at all geocentric, or at least one in which geocentrism is at most a human construction.  As Dante ascends Jacob’s ladder to the Empyrean, the invisible Heaven only known to mystics here on earth, he looks back at the system of stars and planets and Earth and realizes that, from the perspective of the highest heaven, Earth is a tiny ball, something seemingly insignificant in the grand system.  I realize that he was no Keplerian astronomer, but I do think that this move in the poem at least acknowledges that the mathematical models that governed his own grasp on astronomy was an utterly contingent, human-all-too-human construction, the sort of humility that I have to respect, even when his politics do not admit of that humility.

What impressed me most on this trip through Heaven was Dante’s particular sense of history.  I still think that in significant ways Dante signals the beginning of the Renaissance, not least because of his profound respect for and sophisticated theory of history regarding Imperial Rome.  For Dante, Rome is neither the eternal city (Augustine does not allow that) nor exclusively the Great Babylon of Revelation but something more like the nations that Isaiah and Amos prophesy against in their respective books, and that relativism regarding Rome strikes me as a change from Biblical and even classical treatments of the great city.  The most that can be said for Rome, Dante’s Justinian asserts, is that it was instrumental for God to avenge original sin (Jesus did die on a Roman cross, after all), but there’s no sense that the crucifixion exclusively defines Rome any more than do the glories of the Republic or the promise of the Empire.  Instead, all three realities are present in Dante’s Paradiso, and his hope for a restoration of Empire has little to do with any sort of divine favor posited for the city so much as a pragmatic concern, namely that without an empire, outlaws terrorize the frontiers of cities with nobody there to check them.

I know that this year’s Dante posts have been somewhat scattershot, but I’m thankful that I had another chance to read this wonderful poem.  For the first time this year, I’ll be teaching the Purgatory in Western Literature I this spring, so I’m not done with Dante for the school year just yet.  Just wait–I might just write about the journey again.

Dante 2010: Inferno

Dante 2009: Paradiso

Dante 2009: Purgatorio

Dante 2009: Inferno

Dante 2008: Paradiso

Dante 2008: Purgatorio

Dante 2008: Inferno

Being a bit of a troublemaker, one of the things I like most about reading Dante every year is telling people that I’m on to the Purgatory canticle.  Now folks who know me will simply smile and nod, but on occasion I still get someone naive enough to ask the obvious question: “You don’t actually believe in Purgatory, right?”  And of course, since I’ve been doing this for nine years (as long as I’ve been married), I’ve got my stock answer ready in my pocket: “When I read Dante I do.”  If I get a shake of the head and a roll of the eyes, fine, but I’ve got a follow up ready as well if there’s some genuine concern: “That’s alright; when I read The Chronicles of Narnia, I believe in talking lions.”

This school year I get my first crack at teaching this poem that I love so much, and rather than put Inferno on my syllabus, I’m going to have my students read Purgatorio. (Before anyone objects that I should teach the whole poem, it is a survey of Continental literature from Homer to the Renaissance, so I do have to do things other than Dante.)  I know that some of my students (at a relatively conservative evangelical college) will find this odd, but having become a lover of Dante’s journey, I think that my students stand to learn more from this middle section than from the other two.

Right at the outset of the Canticle, the pilgrim (who gets called Dante at the end of the Canticle) gets a flurry of signs to add to the sense that he’s been building through the Inferno that God’s order is going to defy mortal expectations.  In the circle of virtuous pagans in the Inferno, Dante has seen Julius Caesar, signaling that the dictator-for-life is among the virtuous despite being born out of season.  Then, among the wicked counselors, he runs into Curio, who counseled Caesar to lead his armies into Rome without delay.  Curio receives a far more severe punishment than did Caesar himself.  Then, in the deepest part of the lowest circle of Hell, Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed and murdered Caesar, receive the harshest of all the punishments, forever ground between the teeth of Satan.  But then, as Dante approaches the shores of Mount Purgatory (which, in Dante’s geography, is a grand mountain directly opposite Jerusalem on the global sphere–yes, Virginia, they knew the earth was round in 1308), guarding the place where the limits of pagan virtue meet the gifts of special grace, there stands Cato of Utica.

Cato’s case, of course, is one of Plutarch’s noble Romans and a compelling story: a fierce conservative and defender of the Republic, he opposed Caesar in the early days of his seizure of Rome, and when it became clear that the resistance to Caesar’s invasion were going to fail, rather than live under a tyrant, he committed suicide in the city of Utica, whose name became attached to his legend.  Since most folks who are reading the first Canto of Purgatorio just came out of Inferno, just about everyone realizes that something screwy is going on here: Cato is a suicide, and they get their own place in Hell.  He opposed Caesar, and most of those who did have their places.  And he’s famous (in Plutarch’s account) for having regicidal urges as early as the Sulla years, hardly compatible with Dante’s imperialism.  But none of that matters: in Dante’s Purgatory, he’s the gatekeeper.

Also strange about Purgatory is that, at night, the serpent from Genesis still roams the base of the mountain.  Angels drive it off whenever it menaces those who wait outside the gates to Purgatory proper (because they died violently without having opportunity to confess their sins or because they were wrongly excommunicated), but the presence of danger that is not, as far as I can tell, illusory always makes me scratch my head, but it also reminds me that, for Dante, Purgatory is capped not by any final “test” at the “Pearly Gates” but with Earthly Paradise, the garden from which God drove Adam and Eve.  In other words, to get rid of the vices that earthly life drives between the soul and the soul’s desire for God, the soul spends time ascending to the innocence that Adam and Eve enjoyed.

It’s no surprise that T.S. Eliot was a great admirer of Dante.  Anyone familiar with his idea of the objective correlative in poetry need look no further than Purgatorio to see the roots of the idea.  Rather than lecture at the souls to educate them away from their vices or even narrate entire stories from the Bible and from classical antiquity, each level of Purgatory flashes before the souls still images from these stories, invoking the souls’ imaginations, and by sending brief phrases from those stories to invoke their memories of the full tales.  In other words, these fragments become the primary educational programme that cleans from these souls their disordered desires.

Desire, of course, is the very heart of Purgatory.  There is a guard keeping some people out in this Canticle (unlike Inferno or Paradiso), but there’s nobody stopping anyone from ascending to Heaven at any time.  Rather, those souls which remain on the mountain of Purgatory simply do not yet want to be in the presence of God yet.  For some this is for guilt, for others because of residual desires for earthly things, for others still a residual sense of autonomy from God.  But when a soul’s desires become unified, when the soul rises from Purgatory, all the men and angels in this realm rejoice, and that’s one of the really memorable moments in the journey: whereas in Hell the souls ignored or even attacked one another, everyone in Purgatory loves everyone else and rejoices when others benefit.

In sum, because the souls in Purgatory are there for a while, then depart, it remains the most accessible of the three Canticles.  Sandwiched between two realms where the passage of time does not mean anything, Purgatorio presents a picture of struggle, the strife that comes to those who seek to serve God but find their own vices interfering.  I know that the standard argument against Purgatory is that it’s not in the Bible, and I can grant that.  But poetically, it does a great service to how I imagine the strong disconnect between how I live and how my thoughts operate and even the paucity of my desire for the divine, and I still live as one in debt to Dante for that.

Dante 2009: Paradiso

Dante 2009: Purgatorio

Dante 2009: Inferno

Dante 2008: Paradiso

Dante 2008: Purgatorio

Dante 2008: Inferno

Those of you who read my blog over at Hardly the Last Word for the last few years (I love both of you!) remember that, every summer since 2002, I’ve read Dante’s comedy from start to finish, and for the last couple years I’ve also blogged about each canticle as I’ve finished it.  I’ve put links to those posts above.

A couple of things have changed since summer 2009.  Most obviously, I’m doing most of my blog work here at the Christian Humanist, so for the foreseeable future, I’ll be writing those summer posts here.  Less obvious is that this summer, I elected to finish all three before I started my Inferno post.  I’m not sure whether the posts’ quality will improve or suffer, but I wanted to try out a global view of the poem this time around, so I have.  As with last summer, the translation I’m using is John Ciardi’s paperback edition (whose footnotes I especially like).

Every time I read through this magnificent poem something new occurs to me, and this time what stood out was that Dante’s journey arises not mainly out of his own midlife crisis (though that’s certainly a part of it) but because of the advent of “the Greyhound,” as the poem calls a figure that most scholars identify as Can Grande of Verona.  This apocalyptic figure, born in Dante’s own epoch, will be a true Aristotelian king, providing the strong government that will eliminate the dominance of human vice in the realms of power.  I don’t think that even Dante is naive enough to assume that his reign would entirely eliminate human sinfulness, but the poem does seem to assume that life in the city-states of northern Italy has become so wretched that God has elected to anoint a king to bring those vices under rein.  Since I’m writing this after completing Paradiso, I notice this time around that Can Grande, though Dante never names him, occurs over and over again through the poem, connecting this grand journey far more particularly to the life of Florence and the surrounding areas than I’d ever noticed before.  To exercise as much humility as I can muster, when I said on our podcast that I don’t think of the Comedy as a national epic the way that I think of the Iliad or The Faerie Queene as national epics, I think I might have underplayed this end of things pretty seriously.

I also noticed on this run the strong insistence throughout the poem on the will and its nobility.  I use that word because “free will” in American English more often than not loses the old sense of “free,” the idea that there are men who are neither slave nor free, the peasants of the ancient world who own no property.  Freedom in that ancient and medieval use carries with it the idea not only of non-interference (the extent to which “free” means anything in the political conversations I overhear as I wander the world) but also of domain.  Lost is the sense that Hegel assumes when he says that in the Persian Empire only one was free, in the Roman Republic a few were, and in a liberal democratic society all were: what counts here is not an absence of “gummint” but the ability to hold sway in matters of importance, something that comes with nobility.  In Dante’s underworld, to get back to the poem, Hell is “the gate denied to none” (14.83), and the souls who go from Ostia to the river Styx go there not under pain of the lash but because their sin-hardened souls result in their own willing themselves into Hell.  Nobody especially enjoys being in Hell (understatement, I know), but all of the people there decided to be there.

The usual alienness of the medieval still strikes me as I go through what remains my least favorite of the Canticles: I still can’t figure out why Caiaphas, who among other things abuses the power of the priesthood and leads to the conspiracy to get Christ crucified, is in the circle of the hypocrite-friars (Canto 23).  I can’t figure out why falsifiers of currency and alchemists get a far worse punishment than do pimps, seducers, and those who counsel kings to initiate wars (Canto 29).  But Dante’s mastery of the horrifying still amazes me: without Stephen King’s penchant for describing human viscera, Dante creates true existential horror not only with the circle of thieves who steal one another’s bodies (Canto 25) but with the story of Guido da Montefeltro (Canto 27), whose reticence to tell his story is the epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”   Montefeltro’s heart-wrenching story begins with a career advising kings in their bloody conquests, then a turn from the sword to the monastic life for the sake of his soul.  But when a deceitful Pope needs an advisor to run his own military endeavors, the wicked Boniface promises him absolution for the blood that will be shed by his counsel.  When Montefeltro dies, as the angels are about to carry the Friar off to the mount of Purgatory, a demon-logician arrives and snatches him away.

In sum, although Inferno is the Canticle that I read through with the least pleasure these days, nonetheless it’s still Dante, and his sense of the strong systemic connections between all realms of human life still make it some of the best poetry that one could hope to read.

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: Out of respect for Hulu watchers, TiVo devotees, Netflix subscribers, and other folks who didn’t watch the Superbowl-length extravaganza on May 23, I’ve waited until now to start writing about LOST for this blog.  That said, this series of posts is going to begin with the last scene of the last episode of the last season of the show, and I’m going to work elements from the show’s entirety into these posts.

I’ve made a studied effort not to look at any bloggers’ theories about the entity on LOST known variously as Jacob’s brother, the smoke monster, Smokie, the Man in Black, and (in my mind anyway) Esau.  I might go looking after I finish writing this, but I haven’t yet.  I wanted to take this stab based entirely on my own take on the show, modified of course by my own literary background but uninfluenced by what might prove to be more compelling takes on the phenomenon.  I’m vain that way.

What I Won’t Say about Smokie

To begin with, I think it’s fairly obvious that there’s little sense in doing a Carl Linnaeus-style genus-and-species taxonomy of Smokie (that name I’ll use as a default, largely because Sawyer’s pet name for the phenomenon is fun and doesn’t carry any more particular baggage).  In the universe of LOST Smokie seems to be sui generis or at the most (and I’ve not read any theories about Jacob and Smokie’s mother either) an entity of which there can only be one at a time in the world.  Moreover, given that he spends the entirety of the series wandering in the island’s hidden places, there’s not much sense in pondering what a laboratory examination might yield.

I note these things not merely for the sake of an academic’s peculiar caution with categories (though I do exhibit that trait, I’m sure) but because Smokie is an entity that the LOST writers have shielded from the rather clinical view of the superhuman that sometimes characterizes shows like Smallville, Angel, and Battlestar Galactica (with the notable exception of whatever becomes of Starbuck).  In the universe of LOST nobody ever puts Smokie on a table to do a DNA analysis or traces the origin of his species.  Smokie’s origins have something to do with a woman who murders the mother of newborn twins and raises the latter-day Castor and Pollux to be guardians of the island, but the actual nature of Smokie–why he can’t go through sonic fences or go any farther out in the water than where a freighter anchors–remains a mystery in terms of the show.  In some sense Smokie is a being of the angelic order, in Thomist terms: he is his own species.

So, limited in my angles of approach, the rest of this post is going to examine Smokie from two sides, one being an empirical examination of phenomena within the show and some deductions therefrom; and the other being a look at some literary antecedents for such a critter.

What the Show Revealed

This will not by any means be an exhaustive list, but some data and inferences about Smokie (mainly from the last season) lead me in particular literary directions:

1. The bones of Jacob’s brother and the woman who raised him remain in “the cave” for the two thousand years (I’m assuming that Jacob and his brother had something to do with the Roman Empire since everyone in their episode was running around speaking Latin) that Smokie is active in the lives of those who live and die on the island, so Smokie and the person who was Jacob’s brother are not identical.
2. Even when Smokie takes on the appearance of John Locke, he seems to maintain the personality that he had during the Roman chapter and in 1867, when Richard Alpert arrived on the island.  When Jack tells him he’s nothing like John Locke, Smokie doesn’t object.  So Smokie and the person who was Jacob’s brother are not radically separate.
3. Although the audience first sees Smokie when Jacob floats his brother’s unconscious (dead?) body into the Heart of the Island, the Rebekah figure (who was not Jacob’s mother biologically  but who raised both boys) does seem to be the main suspect when an entire human settlement ends up murdered and their dwellings burnt, so something with superhuman destructive capabilities predates Jacob’s brother’s becoming Smokie.
4. Smokie is able to pick up objects as heavy as human bodies and fling them, and he also breaks stones apart in a fight scene with Jacob’s disciples.  Moreover, the Dharma Initiative and later Charles Widmore seem to be able to keep Smokie at bay by the use of electronic technology.  So Smokie is neither pure spirit nor entirely a hallucination but an entity who occupies this position rather than that and who can act upon material objects.
5. Although whatever entity (the show seems to indicate it was Rebekah) destroyed the human village also buried the wheel house, Smokie seems to have excavated it to the point that, after Locke time-shifts from before the well was filled to after, Smokie can guide him to the wheel itself.  So he seems to retain both his desire to leave the island and his ability to manipulate the forces of the island.
6. When the system that sustains his existence as Smokie breaks down, the entity, still in the form of John Locke but retaining the personality of Smokie, becomes mortal again (as does Richard Alpert).

Monsters with History

I highlight these things because Smokie’s being within the show seems to follow in certain literary traditions, Smokie taking on the role of an allegorical Sin articulated most materfully in medieval literature.  In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, during an early vision, Reason (which in the allegory seems to be Right Reason, or Reason as illuminated by God’s Law) comes to hear confessions, and the seven sins themselves come forward and confess.  The interesting thing about the scene is that each of them was at one time a person with a name, and each stands, upon repentance, to return to human community when shriven.  But as each advances, its human form (there are former men and former women here) has been distorted by the sin and by the stories of sin that it tells so that the bodily form has taken on the distortion of Sin just as the soul is distorted by Sin.  So these pitiful souls share continuity with their human histories even as the sin that defines them has rendered each monstrous.

Although his scenes take place in the post-mortem world (which the island in LOST is not, I assert), Dante’s monsters also share in this tradition.  Two notable monsters in Dante’s Inferno (which will get its own post here soon–I’m midway through Purgatory in my annual summer reading) are Minos and Geryon, one a Minoan and the other a Spanish king who, in the underworld, lose their human forms entirely but continue to act in manners that indicate a continuity of personality.  Minos is transformed into a snake-man but nonetheless retains his personality as the harsh judge, and Geryon becomes a chimaeric creature with a human head, dragon’s scales, and lion’s claws; but his deceptive character makes him one of the lords of the circles of frauds deep in Inferno.

Later, Renaissance writers would pick up on these things, notably Spenser in Faerie Queene with Jealousie, the monster who began his career as husband to a licentious woman; and Milton’s version of Satan and the host of Hell, who transform from angelic forms into monstrous demonic ones as their sins become their essence.  In all of these instances, the characters retain genuine and distinct human (or angelic) histories even as their bodies or forms distort and become sub-human (or sub-angelic), terrifying to those who would behold them and often more capable of destruction than their former bodies.

So although LOST (wisely, I think) will never put Smokie on an examination table to see what his DNA structure looks like, a close look at the narrative data indicate that Smokie is an embodied creature whose superhuman powers warp but do not annihilate the humanity that gives shape to his activities.  The Smoke Monster will never again be the human body that he left behind in the Roman era, but he will never be rid of the things that drove him to spite his brother and adopted mother, and in some respect he becomes in the universe of LOST the embodied sin Spite.  As an act of moral storytelling, this brilliant and ancient move allows the show to take an entity at its first appearance entirely disconnected from the human beings on the show and demonstrate that, in times at first masked, the Smoke Monster, like Geryon and Envy and Jealousie and perhaps even Grendel, has in his narrative roots the same mothers and brothers and loves and hates that the beloved Jack and Kate and Sawyer (and on some days even Ben Linus) have.  So the nature of the smoke monster and the nature of the Oceanic 815 survivors is ultimately not a difference rooted in cells and molecules but in story and choice and circumstances and those other human, all too human moments that make us what we are.

There but for the grace of God go all of us.