Comments, Inferno, Cantos XXX thru XXXIV

Some random thoughts.  Ice is the final state for the worst sinners in Cocytus.  Why ice?  Flame is the sign of the Holy Spirit, and one burns with the love of God.  One is purged by fire in Purgatory.  The Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost as a breath of flame, but Satan in Cocytus whips up the winds that freeze as a frigid breath.  Ice freezes one into a final state, preserving the final state of the heart.  In physics, cold is the absence of heat, not really its own condition.  Dante could not have known that, but as it turns out evil is the absence of good, again not its own condition.  I think Dante would have been happy to make the analogy.

Back in Canto XXI, when the leader of the Malebranche blew a fart, I had said that Hollander pointed out that the critic Gian Roberto Saroli said the fart and the razzes by the other Malebranche were only musical notes in hell.  Well isn't the horn blast in XXXI by Nimrod a musical note?  Maybe Saroli meant the only musical notes in the Malebolge, not all of hell?  I don't know.  It seems to me the horn is a musical note.  It's not important.

The incoherence of Nimrod's unartful speech accentuates the theme of building the language and poetry that praises God.  Dante follows the belief that God created the beauty of language that got degenerated into a babel of tongues, and Nimrod is supposed to have been the legendary cause of it.

I'm not sure it was clear in the last Canto, but a time scheme is provided.  If you break through the hints, you can deduce two 24 hour periods between when Dante starts his journey back in Canto I and when he exits the underground of hell at the end of Canto XXXIV, but the perception of time is greatly distorted.  It takes 24 hours to go through all of hell, which is the thirty-three and a half cantos before they go into that crevice and 24 hours to walk through the underground in the second half of the last canto to reach the purgatory island.  How can they have gone through all of hell in 24 hours?  Dante is just as adept with time distortion as the modernist writers.

Dante's hell is portrayed as a funnel of concentric, descending circles.  But with all the ravenous eating that happens, especially here in the lower reaches (tenth bolge where the sinners rip into each other, Ugolino eating the brains of Ruggieri, Satan munching on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, perhaps one can look at hell as a digestive tract.  Eating is definitely a motif here, and I think it's meant to be a parody of eating the body of Christ. 

Such mimic parody of sacred activities and ideas run throughout, as I have pointed out with the three sinners in Satan’s mouth as parodies of the three crucified at Golgotha.  Such parodies run throughout literature, but mostly in modern literature.  I can't think of another literary work prior to the modernist movement that relied on parodies of Christian theology.  Can anyone think of any?  Did Dante invent this?  I like to think of such parodies as the inverse of that which they parody. 

Irene was surprised that alongside Judas are two Romans from antiquity, Brutus and Cassius.  Yes, they are subordinate in importance to Judas Iscariot.  Remember Judas is in the middle and the region of hell, Judecca, is named after him, which is kind of odd since Brutus and Cassius died chronologically before Judas and would have been in hell before him.  But despite being ancillary to Judas, their importance is still paramount.  Remember the three themes that are overarching to the Comedia: man's relationship to God, man's relationship to society, and building the language that reflects the beauty of the Divine.  Brutus and Cassius assassinated the just lord of what would be the Roman Empire, and the Empire to Dante was the proper arrangement of society.  Ideally Dante probably would have wanted an evil poet who betrayed someone to be placed in one of Satan's mouths, and therefore represent each one of his overarching themes.  I guess there was no one, and so he doubled up with two Romans.

That Dante selected two Romans from antiquity is important for more reasons.  Throughout the Inferno you kept seeing characters from the classical world as well as those surely in Christendom.  Dante is knitting together the two worlds as complementary and continuous.  The early days of Christianity struggled with how to understand their classical roots, but ultimately they came to accept them.  Dante clearly does, but this is over a thousand years after the start of Christianity.  Personally I find the mythical characters incorporated rather hokey, one of my minor criticisms.  Though legendary characters such as Ulysses might have been real in Dante's mind, surely he knew the Minotaur wasn't real.  Hell is the only part of the Comedia he can use pagan world persons, so he does maximize interspersing them.  Remember one can only be saved if you're a noble Jew or a Christian, so classical world persons do not figure much in Purgatorio and Paradisio, though by hook and by crook Dante does sneak a few in. 

The Roman world was also important because it was through the Roman Empire that God spread Christianity.  If God had given Constantine a sign to conquer, then the integration of Christianity with the Roman Empire was divinely sanctioned.  So Brutus' and Cassius' assassination was an attempt to thwart the will of God that would have established the best of secular government possible.  To Dante, the Roman secular government was a check on the clergy and set up a rational organization of society.  If you look at the trend in the severity of sins - in increase of severity: sins of appetite, sins of heresy, sins of violence, the Malebolge which are sins of undermining society, sins of treachery - they represent a trend toward the greater dissolution of community.  The tenth bolge, that for counterfeiters where now it's not demons exacting punishment but other sinners on each other, shows Dante's view that the undermining of community is the greatest sin because it creates cynicism and doubts to its legitimacy.  Dante stresses, therefore, that the community takes precedence over the individual. 

Finally one last trend we see culminate in the last cantos is Dante's loss of pity for those in hell.  Remember at the beginning he had such compassion for Francesca and Ciacco in those early circles, but his sense of pity seems to attenuate as the journey progresses, and finally in these last cantos he is hardened and willing to exact justice himself.  He feels nothing for the suffering and the slapstick violence of those in the tenth bolge, no compassion or even contrition for the face he accidently (or divinely guided) kicks, no compassion for the traitor Bocca - indeed he tries to pull out his hair - no compassion, except for the children, for Ugolino's tragic story, and no compassion for Fra Alberigo, even reneging on a promise to him.  One can say that this loss of compassion for those in hell is the lesson that Dante the pilgrim learns as he goes on his journey.  Today we might be taken aback by that.  There are those today that pray for those in hell, and personally I think Christians should have compassion for all, even those undergoing eternal punishment.  But here's Dante's view.  Those in hell have come to God's divine justice, and to hope otherwise is to work against God's will. 

One other point I forgot to make.  As I said in my summary, being inverted while traveling out of hell is his imaginative understanding of what it means to pass from the northern hemisphere to the southern.  Notice when he passes what I think is the midpoint of Satan, he crossed the equator.  When the pilgrims come to the outside world again, they find themselves on the shores of an island, which they will discover when the sun comes out that it’s the island of purgatory.  Dante’s geology is interesting and will be further explained in the Purgatorio.  I’ve never completely understood it, but the critics say it makes sense.  Notice though, Dante in the early 1300’s knows the earth is round.  Don’t let people tell you that it was only with Columbus that people realized the earth was not flat.  It was known before hand.  The one thing Dante seems to get wrong I think is that he believes there is a 12 hour time difference between the northern and southern hemisphere.  Time differences work across longitudinal lines, not latitudinal lines.  There would be no time difference if Dante had just traveled due south on the same longitudinal line.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since the Ugolino scene, spanning Cantos XXXII and XXXIII, is so famous I should examine it in some detail.  The pilgrims have just left the traitorous Bocca behind when they stumble onto two souls locked together.

We had left him behind when I took note

of two souls so frozen in a single hole

the head of one served as the other's hat.  (XXXII. l. 124-6)

Describing Ugolino as Ruggieri’s cap is I think meant to be funny, though we will see it’s dark, ghastly humor.  The top man is gnawing on the brain of the bottom man, and Dante gets rather specific:

As a famished man will bite into his bread,

the one above had set his teeth into the other

just where the brain's stem leaves the spinal cord. (127-129)

Apparently Ugolino’s mouth is right at the base of the skull, just above the neck.  And Dante asks him, 'O you, who by so bestial a sign/show loathing for the one whom you devour,/tell me why’ (133-5).  The “bestial” significance is clearly emphasized and shows how when community breaks down man returns to a savage state.  It is also meant to recall the three beasts that were chasing Dante at the beginning of the Inferno in Canto I.  If one of the beasts had caught Dante, would he be in Ruggieri’s position?  We were never told what was the cause of Dante’s midlife crises.  Was it something as sinful as Ruggieri?  Probably not, nonetheless there is a parallel.  Side note: isn’t it stunning that a bishop, a man of religion, would be as cunning and viscious as Ruggieri? 

With skillful use of suspense, Dante holds off Ugolino’s response until the next canto.

He raised his mouth from his atrocious meal,

that sinner, and wiped it on the hair

of the very head he had been ravaging.

Then he began: 'You ask me to revive

the desperate grief that racks my heart

even in thought, before I tell it.

'But if my words shall be the seeds that bear

infamous fruit to the traitor I am gnawing,

then you will see me speak and weep together. (XXXIII.l. 1-9)

Hollander points out that Ugolino’s first words 'You ask me to revive/the desperate grief that racks my heart’ echo Aeneas’ words in The Aeneid when he is asked to tell the story of the fall of Troy and his escape from the burning city.  It is a memory most painful as he had witnessed the slaughter of his friends and relatives.  Ugolino too is dealing with a painful memory.  It’s interesting to contrast that Aeneas heroically saves his father and children at his horrific moment while Ugolino indirectly causes his children’s deaths.  Memory will be an important theme in Purgatorio in that we are presented with the problem of how do sinners who repent clean away a sinful memory, since memory is almost a reliving of that sin.  Ugolino’s punishment, and actually all the sinners in hell, includes the eternal memory of their sin.

Dante takes it for granted that his reader knows the Ugolino/Ruggieri story, which I outlined in my summary for this canto.  The two had colluded on a series of betrayals with ultimately Ruggieri betraying Ugolino by locking him and his children in a tower and starving them to death.  Ugolino’s story focuses on the starvation inside the tower.  First, before food was withheld, he tells how he had a premonition of his future, ‘when, in a dreadful dream,/the veil was rent, and I foresaw the future’ (26-7).  “The veil was rent” connects with the Christ’s crucifixion, the veil in the temple being split (Matt 27:51).  His dream is of a lord (standing for Ruggieri) hunting a wolf and wolfcubs (Ugolino and his children) with hounds, and the hounds ripping at the wolf’s flesh. 

Ugolino next turns to Dante and realizes Dante is unmoved by the story.

'You are cruel indeed, thinking what my heart

foretold, if you remain untouched by grief,

and if you weep not, what can make you weep? (40-2)

He is looking for pity it seems, and when he doesn’t receive any he ups the ante on his story.  He tells of when he wakes and at the hour he would normally have been fed, instead of food he heard the nailing shut of the door.  His reaction was of being stunned: 'I was so turned to stone inside I did not weep’ (49).  How should we take that?  A heart of stone tends to imply a lack of compassion.  He doesn’t weep but his children weep.  They don’t have a heart of stone.  Ugolino says that he gnawed his hands in sorrow, while the children thought he did it out of hunger.  Should we believe him?  Many of the souls encountered in Inferno have not been completely straight with the truth.  The children offer themselves for food.  He doesn’t offer himself as food for them.  Is there a selfish motive here for not telling the full truth?  I suspect so. 

Ugolino goes on to tell on how one by one his children died in front of him.  And he concludes his story, the bodies of his children in front of him, with enigmatic line, “Then fasting had more power than grief” (75).  Are we to read it as because of his grief he was able to fast from eating his children, or the hunger from not having eaten overwhelmed his grief and he ate his children to survive as long as possible?  Hollander goes on to explain both readings have at various times been in vogue, and that the historical evidence probably, though not conclusively, showed he did not eat his children.  However, this is a work of fiction, and Dante has at times altered history for his use.  But it’s unclear if Dante even knew the reality; tales have a way acclimating barnacles.  Look at the very next lines.

Having said this, with maddened eyes he seized

that wretched skull again between his teeth

and clenched them on the bone just like a dog. (76-8)

Ugolino seized with rage returns to gnawing on Ruggieri.  The memory of gnawing on his children is what I think overwhelms him.  And the cannibalism on Ruggieri becomes poetic justice as eternal punishment.  And the feeding upon other human beings is an ongoing motif in these latter cantos.  Why would Dante not go as far with it as possible?  I believe Ugolino did eat the bodies of his children, until he too died.

With that I conclude this survey of Dante’s Inferno.  I hope you got something out of it.  The book club will be taking up Purgatorio in a few months, probably around June.  Currently we are reading G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.  I should have a few posts on that, but come and join the Catholic Thought Book Club at Goodreads.  It’s free and filled with good discussion.

Faith Filled Friday: The Way of the Cross by Caryll Houselander, Via Crucis

I have seen many a devotional passage from Caryll Houslander, but this is the first book I’ve read by her.  This was a perfect Lenten read with some of her characteristic insights and lovely prose.  Houselander was a British Catholic artist, mystic, and writer during the first half of the twentieth century.  In The Way of the Cross, she walks us through the Stations of the Cross, each chapter being one of the stations.  At each station she puts you in the scene of Christ’s suffering, moves to some theological point, connects that station to our lives, and concludes with a prayer poem.  In what stands for an introduction, titled Via Crucis, she walks you into a church where a group is praying the Stations.

Three o’clock on a grey afternoon. Outside, a steady drizzle of rain; inside the church, an odd motley of people.

A smartly dressed woman, side by side with one who is shabby and threadbare. A boy and girl who appear to be in love. A very old man, so bowed that he is permanently in an attitude of adoration. A stalwart young soldier whose polished buttons glitter like gems in the candlelight. A couple of students, shabbily but elegantly dressed in corduroys and bright scarves, rubbing shoulders with a gaunt, round-shouldered man who looks like a tramp. A sprinkle of small children. And behind them all, as if he felt himself to be the modern Publican, though there is no reason why he should, a thickset, square-shouldered business man. And a few seconds before the priest, in come a couple of rather flustered little nuns, like birds shaking the rain off their black feathers.

What a diversity of places these people must have come from—luxury flats, tenements, small boardinghouses, institutions, barracks, studios, colleges, doss houses, schools, offices, convents. What sharp contrast there must be between their different lives and circumstances! But they seem to be strangely at one here, gathered round a crude coloured picture on the wall of the church, “The First Station of the Cross,” and it seems to come naturally to them to join together in the same prayer:

“We adore Thee, O Christ, and we bless Thee.”

“Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world.”

The tender rhythmic prayer that has been on the lips of men all through the ages is repeated fourteen times as they move slowly around the church, following the priest from station to station, until they reach the last of all, “Jesus Laid in the Tomb.” (pp. 1-2)

All quotes taken from the 2015 reprint edition by Angelico Press, which is a republication of the original work published by Sheed and Ward, Inc., 1955.

Houselander goes on to explain what the Stations are and their significance, but she ultimately comes to connect them in us:

Different though each human being is from every other, uniquely his own though each one’s experience is, there are certain inevitable experiences which are common to all men and from which none can escape. One of these is death. Another is love. Every human being alive is on the road to death. Every one is capable of love for someone, even if it is only for himself, and the price of love, perhaps particularly of self-love, is suffering. But the power of love, and this does not apply to self-love, is to transform suffering, to heal its inevitable wounds.

Now it is easier to understand what it is that brings the incongruous motley of people together to “make the Way of the Cross.” Each one meets himself on the Via Crucis, which is the road through death to life. In Christ he finds the meaning of his own suffering, the power of his own capacity for love. He finds the explanation of himself in Our Lady too, the Mother of Christ in whose soul He is formed perfectly, as He was once formed perfectly in her body. And in those others too, who are taking part in the Passion of the Son of Man—Simon of Cyrene, Magdalen and John, Veronica, the Women of Jerusalem, the Good Thief, the Centurion, the man who lent his tomb, the scattered apostles who crept back, and ran to the empty tomb on the morning of resurrection. Those in whom, through grace and mercy, Christ is being formed, and growing from the darkness of the buried seed to His full flowering.  (pp. 4-5)

I’m going to try to give you a sample on each Friday coming up to Easter from a particular station.  During Lent I try to pray the Stations every night, with a success rate of two out of three nights.  I encourage everyone to pray them, even if it’s occasional.  I probably get the most spiritual uplift from praying the Stations than from any other single prayer or devotional.  If you don’t know how to pray them, you can read about it here.  If it’s easier to do it in community, I’m sure your local Catholic Church prays them frequently during Lent, but there are many youtube clips to pray along to.  They tend to be filled with meditations that you want to simplify.  It doesn’t need take more than fifteen minutes.  Here is one.

Dante's Inferno, Cantos XXX thru XXXIV

Continuing on with the summary of Dante's Inferno.  First installment was here. Second installment here. Third installment here.  Fourth installment here.  Fifth installment here.  

The pilgrims continue on in the 10^th bolge of the Malebolge, where the sinners of counterfeiters reside, their flesh and bowels rotting away as they caused the body of society to rot.  They are still standing beside Griffolino and Capocchio, when suddenly another sinner, Gianni Schicchi, who impersonated a dead man to alter the real dead man’s will, grasped Capocchio, sunk his teeth in him, and dragged him away.  The pilgrims then encounter a man bloated with dropsy, Master Adam, a counterfeiter of the Florin, who now wishes to just have a drop of water.  He identifies the wretches who are about, speaking disparagingly of them, especially of Sinon, the Greek, who faked surrender to the Trojans so that he could persuade them to take in the Trojan Horse.  Sinon, insulted, strikes Master Adam, who strikes back and the two engage in slapstick violence on each other.  (Canto XXX)

The pilgrims proceed out of the Malebolge into a sort of interspace before reaching the pit of Cocytus where they hear a horn blast.  What at first appear to be towers of a city surrounding the pit are in fact a series of giants that protect it.  The first of the giants they pass is Nimrod, who tradition holds was the builder of the Tower of Babel and responsible for variety of the languages across the earth.  He can neither understand what you say nor speak coherently, but he does have a horn hanging from his neck.  Next is the giant Ephialtes, who joined in the attack to depose the Greek gods.  He is bound in chains.  Finally they arrive at Antaeus, who had faught and lost to Hercules, and Virgil conjures him to lift and place them down to the floor of Cocytus.  The two pilgrims holding on to each other are taken in the Giant’s hand and placed down below.  (Canto XXXI)

Dante has a look about him on Cocytus and finds a frozen world where souls are embedded in ice to the head.  Cocytus is divided into four parts but without any demarcation between them.  The souls are just in a different position to indicate four gradations of treachery.  The first is Caina, named after Cain, the killer of his brother Able.  This section is reserved for those that were treacherous against their family.  In Caina the sinners heads are tilted downward, and so the tears from their eyes freeze against the ground and lock their heads into a fixed position.  He comes across the Alberti brothers who in life were of opposite political parties, and killed each other.  He meets Camiciaone de’ Pazzi, who, treacherous in life, treacherously identifies several souls.  The then pilgrims cross over Antenora, the next section, named after the Trojan traitor Antenor, the place where traitors of homeland reside.  Here Dante stubs his foot against a soul and asks him who he is.  The soul refuses to answer but because he has mentioned the Battle of Monteparti, Dante tries to force him to squeal by pulling his hair out.  The screams from the soul cause a ruckus in which neighboring souls identify him as Bocca degli Abati, the Guelph who cooperated to give the Ghibellines the victory.  In retaliation, Bocca identifies all the other souls.  Finally the pilgrims see two souls frozen together, one gnawing on the brain of the other.  (Canto XXXII)

The soul gnawing on the brain of the other stops to tell his tale, wiping his mouth clean on the other’s hair.  He is Count Ugolino and the  other is Archbishop Ruggieri.  Ugolino had been a Pisan Ghibelline, but betrayed them by joining up with the Archbishop who was a Guelph.  Then in turn the two betrayed another Guelph Nino Visconti.  Finally the Archbishop betrayed Ugolino by locking him and his four sons in a tower and nailing the door shut so that they would starve to death.  Ugolino tells of the most piteous tale of how his four children offered themselves to be eaten to save the father.  But they all died.  With that Ugolino returns to gnawing on the Archbishop’s head.  The pilgrims move on to the third section of Cocytus, Ptolomea, the place where those who were treacherous to their guests reside, and where the souls heads are facing upward, so the tears freeze in a pool that shuts their eyes.  They meet Fra Alberigo, another friar from the Jovial Order, Alberigo had invited two of his relatives who he had had a dispute for dinner and had them slaughtered.  But Dante is surprised because he knows of Alberigo still to be alive.  Just when you might have thought Dante had run out of ideas, Alberigo explains that those that commit this heinous sin sometimes have their soul stripped out of their living body and sent to hell while their body lives on with a demon in it.  (Canto XXXIII)

The pilgrims advance to the final section of Cocytus, Judecca, named after Judas Iscariot, for those that betrayed just lords.  Virgil announces it by sardonically misquoting the Vexilla regis by stating the standards of the king of Hell advance.  “Behold Dis,’ he parodies the Ecco homo and Dante beholds Satan who is 2000 feet high, has three heads (a red, a yellow, and a black) each with a sinner in its mouth, Judas Isacriot and on each side the two Romans who betrayed Julius Ceasar, Brutus and Cassius.  Satan has six bat-like wings on his body impotently trying to gather flight but unable, and causing the wind that freezes Cocytus.  The souls in Judecca are completely submerged and frozen in place, so there is no way to identify anyone else.  Virgil says it is time to go, and so climbing down Satan, and being inverted when they reach his mid point, they enter a crevice in the rock (or is it ice?) that leads them out.  When they were inverted it meant they had passed to the southern hemisphere, where Dante imagines the gravity to have changed direction.  Through the underground passage they reach the exit and can now once again see the beauty of the stars.  (Canto XXXIV)

Personal Essay: Pope Pius XII

In another era of my life I spent a good deal of my internet time on a literature website, and one of the things that got my ire was arguing with atheists over...well, over everything to do with religion.  There were quite a few of the rabid, vociferous, dumb-as-crap kind that had no understanding of Christianity at all.  Their whole modus operandi was to spew out some uneducated, trite common misconception and find reason to blame religion, if not Christianity directly, and then ridicule.  It was probably the single biggest reason for leaving that website.

One particular discussion had to do with Hitler's supposed religious reasons for exterminating six million Jews.  Well, it's quite clear that Adolph Hitler was an adamant atheist, and whatever pitches he made to the religious communities for support were strictly based on political considerations.  Of course politicians do that; it's part of the political game.  You can read about his private, religious views here.  

But what really got my goat was the supposed slander to the Vatican and Pope Pius XII, who they claimed was in cahoots with Nazi Germany.  Nothing was farther from the truth.  In recent years studies have come out that just how involved Pope Pius XII was doing all he could to save as many Jews as possible.  I think there's at least one published book on it out there now.  But I recently came across a retrospective on Pope Pius XII's 80th anniversary of his election to the Papacy from The Catholic League, here.  On the webpage there is a timeline of what people said about Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in its opposition to the Nazis.  It's well worth reproducing:

1940

In the December 23, 1940 issue of Time magazine, Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, "Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came to Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks....Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler's campaign for suppressing the truth."

1941

In its Christmas Day editorial, the New York Times said, "The voice of Pius XII is a lonely voice in the silence and darkness enveloping Europe this Christmas."

1942

In its Christmas Day editorial, the New York Times wrote, "No Christmas sermon reaches a larger congregation than the message Pope Pius XII addresses to a war-torn world this season."

1943

Hitler's biographer, John Toland, said, "The Church, under the Pope's guidance, had already saved the lives of more Jews than all other churches, religious institutions, and rescue organizations combined, and was presently hiding thousands of Jews in monasteries, convents, and Vatican City itself."

Speaking about events in 1943, Sir Martin Gilbert, perhaps the foremost historian of the Holocaust, noted that "the test for Pacelli [Pope Pius XII] was when the Gestapo came to Rome in 1943 to round up Jews. And the Catholic Church, on his direct authority, immediately dispersed as many Jews as they could."

In 1943, the World Jewish Congress thanked the pope for persuading Italian authorities to remove 20,000 Jewish refugees from internment camps in Northern Italy.

On July 25, 1943, Hitler began his plan to kidnap the "Jew-loving" pope.

1944

Jewish scholar Jeno Levai describes what happened in the spring of 1944 in Hungary. "Over 20,000 passports had been issued by the papal Nuncio-on the average of 500 a day."

1945

Israele Anton Zolli, the Chief Rabbi in Rome, converted to Catholicism. He explained why in his book, Why I Became a Catholic. "No hero in history has commanded such an army; none is more militant, more fought against, none more heroic than that conducted by Pius XII in the name of Christian Charity." He chose the name Eugenio as his baptismal name.

1958

When the pope died, Golda Meir, Israel's foreign minister (she would later become prime minister), telegraphed the Vatican saying, "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the Pope was raised for the victims. The life of our times was enriched by a voice speaking out on the great moral truths above the tumult of daily conflict. We mourn a great servant of peace."

Among the Jewish organizations that praised the pope were the following: Anti-Defamation League, the Synagogue Council of America, the Rabbinical Council of America, the New York Board of Rabbis, the American Jewish Committee, the World Jewish Congress, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and the National Council of Jewish Women.

Former Israeli diplomat and author Pinchas Lapide estimated that approximately 860,000 Jewish lives were saved by Pope Pius XII. One thing is certain: no leader, religious or secular, did more to save Jews than Pope Pius XII. He is more than a "Righteous Gentile"-he deserves to be made a saint.

860,000 is almost one sixth of all those that perished.  But Christians didn't try to subvert Hitler's plans only from a distant location.  Many tried to do what they could in face to face encounters with the subsequent results of hundreds of martyrs that we know of.  The two I'm most familiar with are St.Maximilian Kolbe and St. Edith Stein.  

And it wasn't just Catholics who opposed Hitler.  There was plenty of Protestant Christians.  I don't mean to slight them, but I'm just not as familiar with them.  But we should all know of the great Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a sibling pair I just recently read about, Hans and Sophie Scholl.  This brother and sister were both guillotined, of all ways to be executed in the 20th century, for attempting to spread the truth about the Nazis.  From Crises Magazine:

Seventy-five years ago, Hans and Sophie Scholl were guillotined, just four days after the janitor at the University of Munich caught them distributing anti-Nazi fliers. She was 21, he 24, but they went to their death courageously, peacefully. They had stood up against the lies of the Third Reich, its contempt for human life, especially for that of the Jews, its murderous wars, and the brainwashing of its citizens. The Scholl siblings are honored today for their courageous resistance. But attention is not drawn sufficiently to the source of their strength, namely their deep faith in God.

It's well worth reading the entire piece.  Actually the guillotine is a good reminder of that other atheistic blood sport, commonly called the French Revolution.  The reason that western culture has created the notion of human dignity and reverence for the individual is directly a result of our Christian past, with of course its roots being in Judaism. 

I await the day Eugenio Pacelli as Pope Pius XII will be canonized as saint.

Comments, Inferno, Cantos XXIV thru XXIX

I think I made a slight mistake at the end of Canto XXIII.  The Malebranche told the pilgrims that the bridge for the sixth Bolge was out, and that was true.  What was false was they said the bridges in the other causeways (remember there are a sequence of causeways like spokes in a wheel that run toward the center) were available.  As it turns out all the bridges in all the causeways over the sixth-and as it turns out seventh as well-ditch are collapsed.  This collapse occurred with the earthquake that shook the world at Christ's crucifixion. 

It's interesting how Dante's body weight drags him down while climbing through the boulders of the collapsed bridges.  Here's a passage:

At last we made it to the point

where the outermost stone had broken off.

And there I felt my lungs so sucked of breath

that I could go no farther,

but I sat down as quickly as I could.

'Now must you cast off sloth,' my master said.

'Sitting on feather cushions or stretched out

under comforters, no one comes to fame.

'Without fame, he who spends his time on earth

leaves only such a mark upon the world

as smoke does on the air or foam on water.

'Get to your feet! Conquer this laboring breath

with strength of mind, which wins the battle

if not dragged down by body's weight. (XXIV. L. 41-54)

Virgil characterizes Dante's difficulty in climbing in terms of the sin of sloth.  For those interested in the allegory, I would say this is surely allegorical, and I think significant for the entire Comedia.  The body's flesh drags one down in sin, which makes the climb toward heaven difficult.  This will be more fully developed in Purgatorio, which is a mountain that must be ascended, and contrasted in Paradisio where the body becomes weightless for flight through the heavens.

While I'm on that passage, notice how Virgil's line of motivation is for "fame," and earthly endeavor.  Virgil is a pagan; a Christian would say that even fame is nothing but air and smoke that vanishes with respect to heavenly endeavors.  St. Thomas Aquinas called his work nothing but straw at the end of his life when confronted with a heavenly vision.

As someone with Italian ethnicity with immigrant parents from Italy, I had to smirk at the beginning of Canto XXV.  First Vanni Fucci makes some sort of obscene hand gesture as he blasphemes God.  It's not clear what the exact hand gesture is or what exactly it means, and Hollander provides some possibilities.  Italians today are known for their hand gestures.  I wonder if Italians in Dante's day also used a lot of hand gestures, and if they were similar.  Probably not similar, though profanity is profanity.

The other thing that catches my eye is the small rant that Dante has against Fucci's town of Pistoia. 

Ah, Pistoia, Pistoia, why won't you resolve

to burn yourself to ashes, cease to be,

since you exceed your ancestors in evil?  (XXV. L. 10-12)

I'm reminded of Brunetto Latini who goes off on a rant on Florence's neighboring town of Fiesole in Canto XV, calling them "blind," "greedy, envious, and proud," and then we see in Canto XXVIII Dante make a snarky comment about the Sienese and French: "Were people ever/quite so fatuous as are the Sienese?/Why, not even the French can match them!" (l. 121-123).  Hollander's note on those lines is worth quoting: "Florentines love to belittle the Sienese; Italians love to belittle the French.  Dante gets two for one."  I haven't noted it elsewhere, but this kind of anti-other city disparagement seems to be throughout the Comedia, or at least in hell.  I'll have to keep my eyes open for it in the other two cantica.  Back when I commented on Latini's smear I thought it was indicative of his character, but perhaps Dante sees this as a norm since he has his persona participate in it, and apparently frequently.  Some of this borders on what we today might call racist.

I wonder how much of this has to do with Italian city-state rivalries.  I know that Florence and Siena were at war frequently.  Italy didn't get unified into a country until 1871, so regions thought of themselves as insular.  Perhaps it's less so today with unification and easy travel and relocation.  But my mother, who is of an older generation and who under most circumstances is a kindly woman, will to this day slander people from different parts Italy, and she does it almost unconsciously.  Sicilians are a common whipping boy of the despised regions.  And I remember my father hating the French!  I don't know if he ever met a French person in his life, but he would malign them.  He said it had to do with being forced to learn French in school, but it went beyond that.  We do that today here with other countries too, especially the French!  Well, we should all be more considerate, but it's curious that someone as noble as Dante participated in this.

And yet Dante creates a whole ditch for the schismatics, the ninth Bolge where the sinners are split open similar with respect to the division they caused in life.  Would Dante belong in this ditch if he were conscious of his sin?  Or is he conscious that his snarky remarks are sinful and there is some underlying meaning to their inclusion?  If there is, I can't quite grasp the meaning.  It would be some sort of irony, but I can't see the greater significance.  The inclusion of Bertram de Born in that twenty-fifth canto is interesting.  He was a French troubadour poet, of which Dante had a fondness for, but Dante apparently believed de Born's  poetry caused division between father and son.  Carrying his severed head de Born is referred to as "two in one and one in two" (l. 125).  One of the commentators points out that this echoes the Trinity, "three in one and one in three."  The echo is clearly meant to be ironic, since the Trinity reflects the unity ("in the unity of the Holy Spirit") of God while de Born is not unified.

de Born's closing line, line 142 and the final line of Canto XXVIII, is of utmost importance.  "Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso."  Hollander translates it as "In me you may observe fit punishment."  "Contrapasso" or "fit punishment" is what the entire Inferno is based on.  Either the souls choose to be locked into their sin forever, although in a degenerated manner, as in the sins of appetite, or either the souls are forced into a torture as with the sins of volition, they are all fitting punishments.  The notion of contrapasso goes back to Aristotle (contrapossum in Latin), but as Hollander points it goes back to Old Testament retribution, i.e. "taking an eye for an eye." 

I haven't discussed the fascinating sinners of the eighth Bolge, that of false counselors.  I'm going to hold off discussing Guido da Montefeltro (Canto XXVII) until we get to Purgatorio.  His son resides in purgatory and the two make an interesting comparison.  At a minimum I should say that formal repentance without a change of heart doesn't work, even if the Pope absolves your sins.  Since he is so fascinating a case, I will go into a close reading of Ulysses (Canto XXVI) later this week.

I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Canto XXVI with Ulysses residing in the bolge of the false counselors is one of those special cantos that is filled with depth.  It strikes me that there are two levels worth exploring: first on the surface, which pertains to the Ulysses testimony, and second below the surface pertaining how Ulysses resonates to Dante as poet and pilgrim.  But before I get to either, I need to provide context.

1. Context.

As probably pointed out in everyone’s notes, the notion of a false counselor being associated with flame comes from the third chapter of the Letter of James.  Let me quote the entire relevant passage, because even Hollander cuts it short.  I think all six verses from the top of the chapter have relevance.

1 Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you realize that we will be judged more strictly, 2 for we all fall short in many respects. If anyone does not fall short in speech, he is a perfect man, able to bridle his whole body also. 3 If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we also guide their whole bodies. 4 It is the same with ships: even though they are so large and driven by fierce winds, they are steered by a very small rudder wherever the pilot’s inclination wishes. 5 In the same way the tongue is a small member and yet has great pretensions.  Consider how small a fire can set a huge forest ablaze. 6 The tongue is also a fire. It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire, itself set on fire by Gehenna.  (James 3:1-6)

From the first four verses we see how those that provide information—and I would expand teachers to include counselors—have a responsibility and will be judged “strictly” for what they say.  The fourth verse takes on a nautical metaphor which is particularly germane to the Ulysses story.  “The tongue is also a fire” in that it can inspire and lead, but if it lead toward ill it is a fire that can set the whole forest ablaze.  So we can see the Divine Justice in false counselors eternally bound in a tongue of fire.  Contrast this to the tongue of fire that comes down from heaven from the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  The malevolent tongue spews out from the inside for narcissistic ends while the benevolent tongue is a grace from outside.

More context.  Ulysses and Diomedes, his fellow prisoner in the flame, were the two characters from Greek antiquity who devised the Trojan Horse—an empty shell of a structure which tricked the Trojans and caused the fall of Troy.  Inside the belly of the horse were Greek soldiers and when the Trojans opened their gates to bring in what they was a victory offering, the Greeks came out of the horse and sacked the city.  Now Homer only alludes to that part of the story; it is not in The Iliad.  But Virgil in the Aeneid fills in the story.  Now the Romans always identified with the Trojans and did not have a high opinion of Ulysses, and that perspective filters down through the middle ages.  You can see then how Aeneas, Virgil’s hero, is more in accord with Christian values rather than the trickster, almost Machiavellian Ulysses.  In addition to Ulysses deceit, he abandoned his wife and child (although reluctantly which seems to evade Dante) and took up with many women, especially for nine years with the enchantress Circe.  Contrast that to Aeneas who saved his father and child from the burning Troy and was distraught over failing to save his wife.  Aeneas is a true family man while it could be questionable for Ulysses, and it was questioned in the middle ages.

Perhaps I should also state that Odysseus and Ulysses are one and the same.  Ulysses is the Latin name for the Greek.  Dante comes from the Latin evolved part of the Roman world, and so knows him as Ulysses.

More context.  Ulysses in The Odyssey does find his way home after spending a year with Circe.  But Dante either doesn’t know that part of the story—which I find hard to believe, though that’s what most critics claim—or he re-writes that story with care for the old story.  Dante did not have Homer’s stories in Greek, but had to go by anecdote.  But the return to home is such a big part of the Odyssey that I find it difficult to believe that wasn’t in the known anecdotes.  But I’m not a scholar.  In either case, Dante the author takes on the role of the epic writer and creates his own story of Ulysses after his Circe encounter.

2. Dante’s Re-Write of the Ulysses story. 

So Dante has Ulysses shun going home and go forth on further quest after the Circe encounter.  The flame-entrapped soul speaks of it with his first words.

Then, brandishing its tip this way and that,

as if it were the tongue of fire that spoke,

it brought forth a voice and said: 'When I

'took leave of Circe, who for a year and more

beguiled me there, not far from Gaëta,

before Aeneas gave that name to it,

'not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty

toward my agèd father, nor the love I owed

Penelope that would have made her glad,

'could overcome the fervor that was mine

to gain experience of the world

and learn about man's vices, and his worth.  (XXVI. l. 88-99)

That part about “duty’ to family is particularly meant to contrast Ulysses with Aeneas, and of course undermine him in our Christian eyes.  Particularly disturbing is his motivation to “gain experience of the world/and learn man’s vices.”  Christians don’t learn about vices; we’re supposed to reject them.  And on the ship he lets his tongue of fire motivate his men;

'"O brothers," I said, "who, in the course

of a hundred thousand perils, at last

have reached the west, to such brief wakefulness

'"of our senses as remains to us,

do not deny yourselves the chance to know --

following the sun -- the world where no one lives.

'"Consider how your souls were sown:

you were not made to live like brutes or beasts,

but to pursue virtue and knowledge."

'With this brief speech I had my companions

so ardent for the journey

I could scarce have held them back. (XXVI. l. 112-23)

So Ulysses may be in hell for advocating the deceit of the Trojan Horse, but he is a serial sinner of the sin.  He leads his men to where they shouldn’t go and search for things they shouldn’t know.  Ulysses travels beyond the known world, comes across a mountain that reaches the heavens, and instead of flying up to it, his ship submerges and they all perish. 

Perhaps a note on the geography is warranted.  In Dante’s day it was thought that there was no land below the equator.  The mountain they come across is Dante’s mountain of Purgatory which was supposed to be directly opposite Jerusalem on the globe.  Ulysses potential exploration of that mountain can be seen as a blasphemous endeavor. 

The poetic skill arriving to this should also be noted.  Notice how many flying allusions are interspersed throughout the canto.  Ulysses describes his adventure “as a mad flight” where the oars were turned to wings (l. 125).  So even at the beginning of the canto, previous to meeting Ulysses Dante refers to Florence as having “wings [that] beat over land and sea” (l. 2) and there are references to flies and fireflies in the bolge, and finally an allusion to “Elijah’s chariot taking flight” rising up to heaven.  That of course is a contrast.  Ulysses goes down, not up, and he is not holy like Elijah.

It’s interesting that Diomedes never says a word, and so the pairing seems to be similar to that of Francesca and Paolo in Canto V.  They are forever together to suffer from the knowledge of the sin they committed together.

3. How it resonates with Dante:

Hollander and others point out how similar Dante’s journey and poetic endeavor is similar to Ulysses’ supra-human voyage.  Dante is on a journey through the various parts of the afterlife that no single human being has ever attempted.  He will come out of hell to the other side of the world where Ulysses had traveled by ship and be washed up on the very shores of that island with the purgatorial mountain where Ulysses was capsized.  Dante will actually take flight in Paradise where Ulysses attempts flight with his ship.  His flight of poetic skill is analogous to the Ulysses’ search for knowledge and virtue and fame.  Recall back in the Canto XXIV where Dante is struggling to climb out of the sixth bolge, Virgil motivates him with the promise of fame (l. 49-51).  Is Virgil being a false counselor there like Ulysses urges his men to sail on?  The parallels are striking.  And notice too how in the early lines of the this twenty-sixth canto the pilgrim’s climb is filled with potential plummets into an abyss.

We left that place and, on those stairs

that turned us pale when we came down,

my leader now climbed back and drew me up.

And as we took our solitary way

among the juts and crags of the escarpment,

our feet could not advance without our hands. (XXVI. l. 13-18)

And then later:

Rising to my feet to look, I stood up

on the bridge. Had I not grasped a jutting crag,

I would have fallen in without a shove. (l. 43-45)

Their journey is filled with the same potential plunges as Ulysses finds in his demise.  And then Dante ties that potential plunge with his intellectual powers.

I grieved then and now I grieve again

as my thoughts turn to what I saw,

and more than is my way, I curb my powers

lest they run on where virtue fail to guide them,

so that, if friendly star or something better still

has granted me its boon, I don't misuse the gift.  (l.19-24)

He needs curb his “powers/lest they run on where virtue fail to guide.”  He uses the same word “virtue” as Ulysses uses in line 120, “to pursue virtue and knowledge.”  And it’s not a translation discrepancy; Dante uses the same Italian word, albeit in different grammatical form.  That’s not a coincidence.  Dante in this canto is rivaling Homer and Virgil with his re-write of an epic poem, and we will see in a few cantos further how attempts to surpass the classic poets Ovid and Lucan with his poetic use of metamorphosis.  (This parallel between journey and writing poetry is of course is allegory for those who look for the allegorical connections, but as I’ve said before this would be no different than a metaphorical connection in a modernist work.)  Dante is striving for the highest literary achievement.  

So what is the difference?  Why is Dante’s journey virtuous while Ulysses’ a false virtue?  First, Dante tells us in the conditional phrase modifying his concerning about misusing his gift, “if friendly star or something better still/has granted me its boon.”  “Something better still” is God—or Divine Providence—and the “boon” is another wording for grace.  So God has granted him this gift, but still it doesn’t explain why.  I think we can surmise that Dante is journeying for God’s glory while Ulysses is journeying for his egotistical satisfaction.  The distinction I think is captured with the imagery of Elijah rising in his chariot toward heaven.  Dante thinks of Elijah when he first sees the flames as he enters the seventh bolge:

And as the one who was avenged by bears

could see Elijah's chariot taking flight,

when the horses reared and rose to Heaven,

but made out nothing with his eyes

except the flame alone

ascending like a cloud into the sky (l. 34-39)

Elijah is the prophet who is an apologist for the Judaic God, who hears the God’s “small whisper” in the cave at Horeb, who is truly virtuous in the confrontation with the wicked King Ahab, who I think is the only Old Testament person to be assumed into heaven bodily in a chariot of fire and horses, within the midst of a “whirlwind,” mind you.  A whirlwind drives Ulysses under water, but lifts Elijah to heaven.  Dante too will be lifted into the heavens.  Elijah is righteous, Ulysses is not, and Dante is in a learning experience.  When Dante does rise up into the heavens, his thoughts of fame and knowledge vanish, and like St. Thomas Aquinas who thought of his work as straw when confronted with the heavenly vision, Dante desire for humanly fame and knowledge too will vanish.