Half way through the journey of our life How can I express the horror of that wood To speak of that place is so bitter for me I can't say how I got myself into that place, But when I reached the foot of a slope, looking up, I saw its shoulders Then the fear that had endured And just like someone who, struggling for breath so my mind, still in flight, Inferno Canto 1:1-27 Dante's midlife crisisHalf way through the journey of our life, Dante the pilgrim discovers that he is lost in a dark forbidding forest. Since Dante the poet was born in 1265 and the allotted span of a human life is traditionally 'three score years and ten' (70), the journey through the three domains of the afterlife apparently begins in the year 1300. The pilgrim is 35, so at the mid point of his life. But this, Dante says, is the mid-point of our lives, the lives of the readers too, (despite the fact that, sadly, I am no longer 35!). The poem pulls us all into that terrible forest, for according the writer, we are all enduring a mid-life crisis of existential proportions. We, the readers, stand there too, lost and confused with the pilgrim. But not because we stand there as individual readers, but because this is the crisis of the life of the world in which we all live. According to some medieval speculation about the age of the earth, 1300 stood exactly as the mid-point of the history of the world. The Christian world was in crisis as the Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor fought it out for political supremacy over europe. In February 1300 Pope Boniface VIII declared a year of Jubilee (the present Pope has just done the same!) and declared that a plenary indulgence (time off from Purgatory) would be given to everyone who visited the churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome. This was in fact a huge money-grabbing operation, as tens of thousands flocked to Rome. This is where the story begins, in a year like this, a year which finds mankind at its own 'mid-life crisis'. No direction homeThis crisis we face is one of direction. We don't know where we are going and we don't know why we are here. What Dante will describe in this work and what Dante the pilgrim will experience, is the discovery of purpose. He will discover that his goal, his 'chief end', is to find the beauty of God, but he doesn't know that yet and, if he does, then he has no idea how to find it; the pilgrim hasn't got a clue how to get to that vision of God. And that experience of not knowing, is exactly like being lost in a vast and terrifying Forest. I was born and lived most of my life in the United Kingdom but I now live in Sweden. The forests I was used to when I lived in the United Kingdom were tame forests. There were usually clear paths and you couldn't go far without stumbling across a road, a pub, or even in some, a National Trust tea and gift shop! Here in Sweden it's different. The forests are not tame. They can be vast, endless, difficult and sometimes scary. If you can walk through them at all you might find yourself walking for days without encountering another living soul. And some do contain wild animals; elk, bears and wolves. Here it's much easier to grasp the significance of being lost in the middle of a dark forest. Sleepers awake!And the pilgrim has no idea how he got here. He must have fallen asleep, he reasons, allowing us, the readers, to understand this as his dream. He fell asleep and now in his dream state he finds himself in this new reality of lostness and fear. Like the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane, he allowed exhaustion, sadness and disappointment to cloud his senses and wander from the true path. And so the question is asked of the reader; are we asleep too? Is humanity sleepwalking its way to disaster? Fear in the forestIf the Pilgrim's state is one of lostness his experience is one of fear. Three times in these opening lines Dante the poet writes of the pilgrim's fear. He says the very thought of it brings back the terror, the valley in which the forest stands is one that pierced my heart with fear, and that only after he sees the light of the sun does the fear that endured in the lake of my heart all that night die. Alone and directionless, he despairs; he is gripped with terror. But this is a fear and terror shared by the world too. Dante's world too was gripped by the fear of uprisings and terrorism, cultural decline, economic collapse, wars and rumours of wars. In his world too, politicians and churchmen used the rhetoric of fear to elect politicians and sustain unpopular governments, repress minorities and silence dissent. In consequence, his world, like ours, was a world of suspicion, hatreds and, most terrible of all, hopelessness. There too, voices were heard saying 'nothing will change nothing will get better' and 'no good will come of anything'. At the root of all of this was fear. Begin to hopeBut now the pilgrim has woken up. Dante the pilgrim and the world are both at their 'mid-point', facing the darkness 'all around'. Fear and hopelessness are terrible things, discovered in a terrible place. But Dante the poet will not have us linger there despairing. He will speak about such a place despite the evils his pilgrim finds, because of the good he found there. Dante is, above all, the poet of hope and writes to inspire hope in the reader. He writes because he believes that there is a vision of God to be found by everybody. Dante the poet believed that, as we follow the pilgrim on his journey, we the readers will find ourselves carried up by the experience of reading to the same paradise, to the same vision of God that Dante the pilgrim discovers. The Commedia is no 'Rough Guide to the Afterlife'; this is an invitation by Dante the poet to us all to follow the story of his pilgrim character and through his poetry discover the beauty of God! Light in the darknessBut hope has to come from somewhere, inspired by something beyond ourselves. The pilgrim's hope is inspired by the light he sees. The dream-like quality of the experience is emphasised by the fact that, just as in a dream, nothing is consistent; while still in the forest the forest becomes a valley. As he climbs up out of the valley, beginning to ascend the foothills of a great mountain, he sees a brilliant light, the light of the planet that leads men straight, no matter what their road (the sun) blazing out from the top of that mountain. There is light, there is hope; there is a way out from 'the existential midlife crisis'. Me, myself, IThere are at least two distinct voices here. The pilgrim Dante and Dante the poet are not one and the same person. Dante the pilgrim is a fictional character created by the Dante the poet. The pilgrim Dante is ignorant, lost and during his long journey will do and say many stupid things! Dante the poet is wise and in command. He knows things and wants us to know them too! Knowing who is speaking as the narrator at any one point is sometimes difficult. Keeping this distinction in mind is helpful for this poetic journey. But the pilgrim is identified as Dante (i.e. the pilgrim is definitely 'I', Dante Alighieri, from Florence) for a reason. Dante the poet, the 'historical Dante', had himself been on a journey through the 'dark forest'. He probably began writing this amazing poem sometime after 1307, following his exile from his native city of Florence. In a world where identity was determined by where you came from, being an exile was like dying (and perhaps considered to be worse). From being one of the most significant members of Florentine society, deeply involved in the civic life of his city, with status, place and purpose, he had become a 'nobody'. As an exile he had to depend on the kindness of strangers (thankfully he found some generous strangers). As an exile he no longer belonged anywhere. Perhaps that gave him the possibility to imagine a 'place' (God's love) where all mankind belong together. Perhaps the darkness and despair of exile were the necessary pre-requisites to write a poem of hope, the hope of finding 'our way home'. No wonder the protagonist of the Commedia then is a pilgrim, lost and afraid, far from home with no idea (yet) where he is going. But Dante the poet had also found himself lost in another more personal sense. He had been, he tells, us deeply in love from a young age with a woman whom he calls Beatrice. They had never married and in fact both she and he were married to other people and yet his love persisted through his life even after her death. Something of the despair and anguish he went through, finding himself still passionately in love with a woman who was no longer there, who was no longer real, (had she ever been?!) is expressed in his earlier book Vita Nuova (the New Life). But what that book also reveals is that Dante learned that his love for Beatrice was his way of discovering the love of God. Love wasn't pointless or base or sinful. But it wasn't an end in itself either. From that 'dark' place of being struck dumb by the hopelessness of finding himself still desperately in love with a dead woman he comes, in the Commedia, to a place where the beloved is the one who leads him through paradise and to the vision of God. Dante the poet had gone from frustration and despair because of lost love, to a place of faith and hope because of the discovery of Love itself, of which his own love for Beatrice was a mirror. Finding DanteSo, Dante the pilgrim is a creation of Dante the poet's imagination. But it is a creation that is drawn from his own memory, the memory of being man lost, unsure, afraid, hopeless and without identity. The story of the Commedia is actually the poetic story of how Dante the poet discovered his way home. You might also be interested in
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April 2016
GalleryThis blog is as much about images as it is about text. Below is a slideshow of the pictures and images used in this blog. Click on any of the pictures to go to the post where that image is featured.
PostsLocating Paradise #1 In a Garden, Far, Far Away
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #5 'Stuck in the Middle With You'
The Resurrection According to Rahner
Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #4 'And Who by Fire'
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #3: Held in the Balance
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #2: Once, Twice, Three Times a Sinner
The Testament of Abraham and the Threefold Judgement of God #1: The Broad and Narrow Gates
Daily Dante 7: Many Rivers to Cross
Daily Dante 6: 'You Gotta Serve Somebody'
In Hell Everyone Can Hear You Scream. The Vision of Tundale #3
Teeth, Spikes and Cleavers: At the Sharp end of Hell. The Vision of Tundale #2
'No Pain No Gain': The Vision of Tundale #1
'Hellzapoppin':
Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #2 'It's The End of the World as We Know It (and we feel fine)'. Illustrations from Le Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, #1
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #2 Blinded by the Light
Visions of Heaven. Botticini's Assumption of the Virgin #1: Glorious and Immortal
Daily Dante 5: What the gates said.
Daily Dante 4: When I find myself in times of trouble
Daily Dante 3: I'll take you there
Daily Dante 2: Fierce creatures
Daily Dante 1: If you go down to the woods today
In Seventh Heaven or 'What Enoch Did Next'
A World of Fire and Ice: Heaven according to Enoch
The Power and the Glory: Visions of God as king in the Hebrew bible
The Beautiful Bestiary of Catherine Cleves: Monsters and Demons in detail.
Heaven is for Real: Heaven as a physical space up above the sky
Resurrecting the Dead or Reviving the Flowers? The loss of resurrection faith in Judaism.
The Defeat of Death #1: The promise of resurrection in the Isaiah Apocalypse.
The Defeat of Death #2: Death as a hostile power and promise of God's victory in Isaiah
Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: The 'Last Judgement' according to Stefan Lochner
Hell in the Hospital: The 'Last Judgement' of Rogier van der Weyden in the Beaune altarpiece.
'Hell' in the New Testament #2: The gates of Hades shall not prevail
The Hours of Catherine Cleves: Imagining hell and purgatory in Catherine's prayer book
'On Earth as in Heaven': The kingdom of God as a revelation of heaven
'Hell' in the New Testament #1: Gehenna
Lost in Translation #1: How the King James version got it so wrong about hell
Heaven is not our home
Domes, Depths and Demons: The cosmology of the Hebrew world
A Bigger God
"See you in Sheol" - Sheol, the common destination of all
Heaven, Hell and Christian Hope
BooksBelow are some of the books which have helped me the most in the research and writing for this blog. Click on any image to find out more about that book at its page on Amazon uk.
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