Having witnessed the hopeless chasing of the empty banner by the uncommitted souls, the pilgrim notices that they are near the banks of a river. Countless numbers of lost souls wait for the boat that will take them into hell itself. The boat appears, manned by a frightful figure, And now, coming toward us in a boat, INFERNO Canto 3:82-87 [Translation Robert and Jean Hollander: the Princeton Dante Project] During the summer I spent a day in the Swedish mountains. It was wonderful and I will never forget the memories of wandering around the (minor) peaks of the Sarek National Park virtually alone. But to start my climb I had to be taken across a river by boat. The few of us making the journey made our way down from the Fjällstation at Kvikkjokk to the river bank at the appointed time and very soon a small boat powered by an outboard motor came and moored at the jetty and we got on board. Within minutes I realised that the boatman was as much a feature of the national park as the mountains and the river. His name was Björn and naturally and engagingly he asked us who we were and why we were making the journey. He explained the natural features of the river, and took a detour to show us the pool that formed where the river waters came down to mix with the waters of the river (and to feel the cold wind that flowed down from the mountains with the freezing water!). He explained everything gently and effortlessly. He was quiet and unassuming and yet all of us were gripped by his strange charisma and his 'other-worldly' bearing. Later I discovered that he is quite famous and held in high regard by those who have encountered him! He is very special and one of my best memories of that day. If paradise has to be accessed by crossing a river then I know the perfect candidate for the job of boatman! Unfortunately for Dante the boat that came to take him and Virgil across the Acheron river, the boundary between the entrance to hell and hell itself, was not manned by Björn. Instead the figure punting the boat towards them is Charon the mythological ferryman of classical legend. Unlike Björn, Charon is rough and aggressive, part human, part monster, a terrifying, unpleasant, uncouth figure whose appearance reflects his terrible job, conveying the damned to their eventual fates in hell. There is no welcome, no interesting conversation in Charon's boat. There is simply condemnation, accusation and, if we are not careful, a blow from his pole! At first Charon refuses to take Dante across the river to hell. Dante is still alive and Charon spits out his distaste at the unnatural sight of the living in the presence of death and damnation. 'And you there, you living soul, INFERNO Canto 3:88-93 [Translation Robert and Jean Hollander: the Princeton Dante Project] But Charon has no right to deny Dante the pilgrim acces to hell. Like Jake and Elroy Blues, the pilgrim is on a 'mission from God'. His journey is a journey of salvation, a journey to the very heart of God. Charon, representing the old classical world with all its pagan myths and philosophy which Christ has judged by his coming, cannot resist such a journey. He must play his part and take his allotted role in helping to bring the pilgrim to his revelation of God. The message is clear. The world has changed. Christ is Lord and the very intellectual framework by which each of understands and relates to the world must change to reflect that Lordship. Who pays the ferryman?Having witnesses the pitiful state of the uncommitted, those who lacked the moral courage to take sides in the great matters of life, Dante the pilgrim realises that he is near the banks of a great, dark river on which a multitude of poor naked souls stand waiting. This is the river Acheron which in Classical mythology was one of the principal rivers of the underworld. On the banks of the river Dante sees a great multitude of souls waiting to get across to the other side, But there is only one way across the river. The souls must be transported across in a boat, which Dante sees is already heading in their direction. The boat is operated by a figure he recognises from Greek mythology. It is Charon, 'the ferryman' of the underworld. In Greek mythology the dead had to enter Hades, the underworld, by crossing the river Acheron (or in some versions the Styx) by means of a boat. The boatman was a creature called Charon, the son of the primeval god Erebos and Nyx the goddess of night. All those who made that journey had to pay a fee of one Obolos coin. It appears that a coin was placed in the mouths of the deceased when they died in order to pay Charon. Those who could not pay or who were left unburied were left on the shore unable to go to the underworld. There are several literary references to Charon as the ferryman of Hades. In Aeschylus' work Seven Against Thebes which dates from the 5th century BC we read But sail upon the wind of lamentation, my friends, and about your head row with your hands' rapid stroke in conveyance of the dead, that stroke which always causes the sacred slack-sailed, black-clothed ship of Charon to pass over Acheron to the unseen land here Apollon does not walk, the sunless land that receives all men." [854 ff] And in Euripides' Alcestis we read this Alkestis: I see him there at the oars of his little boat in the lake, the ferryman of the dead, Charon, with his hand upon the oar and he calls me now. `What keeps you? Hurry, you hold us back.' He is urging me on in angry impatience." Alcestis 252 ff That reference to 'angry impatience' is an early clue to the nature of Charon as conceived by the Greeks. He was poorly dressed, rough, uncouth and often angry or violent. He is often portrayed on Greek vases But the depiction of Charon here in Dante is taken directly from the version of the myth as found in Virgil's great epic poem, the Aeneid. This shouldn't be surprising since Virgil is Dante-the-pilgrim's guide! At one point in the Aeneid, in book 6, Virgil writes about Aeneas' journey to the underworld to find his father. The journey is described as follows From here is a path that leads to the waters of Acheron, a river of Tartarus, whose seething flood boils turbid with mud in vast eddies and pours all its sand into the stream of Cocytus. A ferryman guards these waters, Charon, horrifying in his terrible squalor; a mass of white beard lies unkempt on his chin, his eyes glow with a steady flame, and a dirty cloak hangs from his shoulders by a knot. He pushes his boat himself by a pole, tends to the sails, and conveys the bodies across in his rusty craft; he is now older, but for a god old age is vigorous and green. Here a whole crowd poured forth and rushed down to the bank: mothers and men, the bodies of great-souled heroes finished with life, boys and unmarried girls, young men placed on the pyres before the eyes of their parents, as many as the leaves that drop and fall in the forest at the first cold of autumn or as the birds that flock to land from the stormy deep, when winter puts them to flight across the sea and sends them to sunny lands. They stood pleading to be the first to cross and stretched out their hands in longing for the farther shore. The grim boatman accepted now these and now those, but he drove others back and kept them at a distance from the sandy shore. Charon is a frightening figure. He is old, with a long unkempt beard and most horrifying of all 'his eyes glow with a steady flame'. He is wrapped in a dirty cloak hanging from his shoulders held by a knot. Aeneas is shocked by the number of people of every description who flock down to the river's edge to meet the boat. He asks his guide, the Sybil, why some are accepted and others not. She explains that Charon is only permitted to take those who have received a proper burial. Those who remain unburied must wait one hundred years on the banks. Then they may cross. Aeneas is perplexed when he discovers this. Aeneas, who was moved by the tumult, asked in wonder: "Tell me, O virgin Sibyl, the meaning of this gathering at the river. What do these souls seek? By what distinction do some retire from the bank, while others are taken across the murky stream?" The aged priestess answered him briefly as follows: "Son of Anchises, and most certainly a descendant of the gods, you see the deep pools of Cocytus and the marshes of the Styx, the river by which the gods fear to swear falsely. This one group here consists of those who are poor and unburied. The ferryman is Charon. The others whom he takes across are those who have been buried. Charon is not allowed to transport them over the hoarse-sounding waters to the dread shore if their bones have not found rest in proper burial; but a hundred years they wander and flit about this bank before they come back at last to the longed-for waters to be admitted to the boat." The son of Anchises stopped in his tracks and stood thinking many thoughts, pitying in his heart the inequity of the fate of human beings. For one hundred years those not taken by Charon 'wander and flit about the bank' until their time is up. It makes standing in the queue at the bank seem perfectly acceptable! So when we read of Dante's Charon as 'an old man, his hair white with age' and of 'the shaggy jowls of the pilot of the livid marsh, about whose eyes burned wheels of flame' it is Virgil's Charon we are meeting. Dante's vision of the Acheron river and Charon the boatman is a direct reference to the experience of Aeneas in the Aeneid. It is this Acheron and this Charon with which we have to do here in the Inferno. What is Dante trying to say?So, the underworld that Dante-the-pilgrim encounters is inspired by the underworld of classical mythology. Throughout the Inferno we discover characters and themes from Classical mythology, a mythology Dante knew was not real. The Inferno is not an attempt to describe hell. Dante was trying above all to convey something of his understanding of what it meant to know and love God. To do that he pictures a realm where people exist who do not love God. He uses the outline of the classical vision of afterworld to show us what life without God leads to. But because each of the punishments reflects the nature of the sin, this is a vision of how lives are now in this living world. Dante is not wanting to warn us about the terrors of hell - he is wanting to show us the tragedy of life lived (now) unaware of the truth and love of God. Dante did not know what hell looked like nor does he pretend to. Every educated reader of his text would have recognised the myriad references to the underworld of Greek and Roman mythology. As we go on we will discover more terrible creatures borrowed from classical mythology guarding the various circles and sub departments of hell. Dante no more expected to encounter such creatures in the afterworld than he did to be lifted up the divine vision by Beatrice the love of his life. Dante uses without apology these classical references and structure his hell around them precisely in order to challenge and undermine that classical world-view on the basis of his understanding of Christianity as the true image of God's love and justice. This is bought out very clearly by the response to Charon's challenge to Dante and Virgil. Charon the classical daemon is there, in Dante's afterworld, but he has no power to refuse Dante passage on his boat. For the christian pilgrim he holds no terrors, nor does he have any say about Dante's progress through hell towards the Light of God. That journey has been ordained by God and nothing from this old, supplanted world of myth and legend can stop or prevent it. Charon may take or leave the poor desperate souls who wait on the banks of the river, but he may not choose whether to take this christian pilgrim who is, as we have seen, on 'a mission from God'. The terrible Charon is silenced by Virgil's mantra that he dare not resist the authority that comes from heaven. History not GeographyDante is not really trying to describe the afterlife. He is not providing a topography or geography of paradise, purgatory and hell. The two realms, hell and paradise, are not really two parts of the same structure (Eternity) existing at the same moment in time. They are, rather, two versions of the world. The one owes everything to classical heritage and remains essentially linked to the past, to the time before the coming of Christ. Paradise is a vision of life as redeemed by God, as the new world to which Dante and all the faithful are advancing. It belongs to the new realm. Unlike the vision of Tundale where the Irish prince Tundale is shown the terrors of a very real hell, (albeit also staffed by mythological creatures), a hell people could imagine actually existing, Dante the pilgrim is shown hell in order to understand the nature of divine justice and human nature. He journeys not to be warned of the fate that awaits him if he does not 'repent' or change his ways, but in order to grow in understanding and love. It is these that will save him and bring him eventually to the Vision of God. 'It's a fair cop'One of the most fascinating and disturbing elements of this passage is that the damned souls seem perversely willing to accept their fate. Although they weep bitterly, they gather on the shore ready for Charon and his boat. As a falcon responds when summoned by its master or as the autumn leaves fall naturally and without resistance, these souls leap into the boat without resistance. They have no choice. They know that this is what they have chosen. What they will find on the other side is their own creation. But those souls, naked and desolate, This passage and the picture of the damned souls as falling leaves is clearly based on Virgil's text. The sense of longing and desire on behalf of the damned to get to the other side and what awaits them is taken directly from the Aeneid. There we read of the desire of the souls to find their way to the land of the dead, to find their proper home. They stood pleading to be the first to cross and stretched out their hands in longing for the farther shore. The grim boatman accepted now these and now those, but he drove others back and kept them at a distance from the sandy shore Dante uses this sense of the longing of the souls who stand on the river bank to make a different point. Whereas in Virgil the souls need to find their home in Hades in order to find peace, here in the Commedia the damned long to find their place within God's Justice. Terrified though they are, they know their proper place is on the other side in hell. This is one of the striking features of the Inferno. By and large, the damned souls know their place and are resigned to their fate. In this they acknowledge the truthfulness of the words inscribed over the gates of hell, that hell has been established by the Justice, Wisdom and Love of God. Unlike the crowd in the vestibule who never found out who they were by choosing (and so have no home), these have made choices and now must find they place they have created for themselves. You may also be interested in . . .
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
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.
Categories
All
|