#445
Undone
For those with a religious bent,
Life on earth seems Heaven sent.
Suffering has a central place
For this fallen Human race.
While Redemption is a given,
That for which Our Lord has striven
On a cruel and rough-hewn cross,
Turning into gain a loss.
Life on earth may not be Hell;
Instead it's Purgatorial
For all those with a Christian bent,
Thus to see the life that's lent.
#225
The Difference
According to Dorothy Sayers*,
Hell is the substance of sin's dire fruits;
While Purgatory, dear reader,
Is the matter of sin's dire roots.
*more or less. Somewhere in her excellent
introduction to The Purgatorio.
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I love literature, primarily because I love stories, adventures; and at the heart of all great literature is an exciting, compelling story—an adventure. Dante, the character in The Divine Comedy, for example, must journey through Hell, see it (really see it, both within and without) and put it beneath him or behind him (that is, reject it absolutely), if he would be saved from it. He must then climb the incredibly steep Mt. Purgatory and ascend through the circles of Heaven if he would see and know what the romantic love of his life (the Florentine young lady, Beatrice) truly means. His adventure, like many quest adventures, begins in a Dark Wood, which leads immediately to Hell, a hideous, horrible and terrifyingly dangerous place; Purgatory begins with one of the most beautiful images in literature, the Ship of Souls ferrying the redeemed to the shores of the mountain; Purgatory itself is an arduous climb and a mixture of extremely terrifying images and extremely beautiful images in that each circle of Purgatory is governed by an angelic splendor, an Angel embodying the virtue of the circle. Dante’s angels are beings to be taken seriously, aesthetically and intellectually. In Heaven Dante’s ascent to God is now easy physically (he and Beatrice rise like helium-filled balloons); but Heaven is intellectually and theologically rigorous (there is even a test); Purgatory created in Dante a mind fully awake; Heaven is what the fully awakened mind truly understands about the universe of which it is a part; Heaven is also a study in the image of light and its increasing splendors.
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The governing substance of the entire Divine Comedy has to do with a fundamental human reality: desire for fulfillment, wholly and completely; desire for a truly, wholly fulfilling love. The best and most meaningful image we have for that reality is Romantic love (eros): and the lovers lived happily ever after. Dante is literally moved by this Romantic love, his very human love for the Florentine woman Beatrice (the quest is for her; see Hell, Canto 2); however, the first real image of the damned in Hell that Dante faces is also an image of that same Romantic love—the lovers Paolo and Francesca who tell their story are forever blown around the second circle by an uncontrollable black wind. Romantic love can lead to Hell; Dante must see that; he does; it overwhelms him and he faints. If the best we have that promises so much is not humanly fulfilling (think of Romeo and Juliet), what is? The entire poem is the answer to that. If I may be so bold—for a moment in human history, all aspects of human life came together to produce in this author’s imagination and work, a story of the human soul’s journey to its absolute fulfillment in the Triune God of orthodox Christianity. The principle that governs Dante’s ascent through Heaven is fundamental to the poem: desire for Divine love enables the soul to understand Divine love. Greater understanding of Divine love leads to a greater capacity to give and receive that love. In other words mind and heart work together in the journey to fulfillment, unity, and Divine peace and love. Dante’s Love and Understanding grow to the point where unity with God (Three in One) is the inevitable end. The Divine Comedy is an astonishing work of literature.
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The reason for describing the Divine Comedy in brief here is that, besides adventure, the poem embodies the three principles that I see at the heart of all great literature: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. In High School, I memorized Shakespeare because, ignorant and foolish as I was, I at least had the sense to recognize that there was language in the poems and plays of exquisite beauty and elegance. I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the ninth grade and even took the part of Nick Bottom the weaver; however, I also memorized Oberon’s I know a place where the wild thyme blows and Theseus’s The lunatic, the lover, and the poet speeches. In my senior year I discovered The Tempest. It was fantasy literature, my favorite kind: there was Prospero, a Wizard (I still love wizards: Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, for example; Tolkien’s Gandalf the White); there was Ariel, an elemental spirit of Air; there were two perfect (archetypal) romantic lovers, Ferdinand and Miranda; and a hybrid, subhuman creature, Caliban (somewhat like Gollum?)—here I underwent a conversion of the first order; I would never be the same because I had discovered in this literary work that Beauty was not some subjective phenomenon, determined by my own emotions, but was a reality embodied in this work and others like it. I could not have explained that at the time, but that was what I experienced. Shakespeare’s language was frequently exquisitely beautiful; The Tempest was the embodiment of Beauty from beginning to end. I was hooked.
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The second principle in Dante is Truth. Having read and taught Dante’s Hell, I understand that the spiritual state defined in the work is a real human spiritual state. Add Purgatory and Heaven and you have an Idea of the complete human self with its loves fully and completely ordered. You can experience in reading the poem the artist’s insight into the meaning and mystery of the human self.
The Truth we experience best in literature, I think, is intuitive truth (intellectus), insight, not moral truth; we may indeed discover moral truths in literature, but I do not believe that is literature’s real purpose. We come to literature knowing, for the most part, moral truths, but if literature is only about telling stories that have morals, there is no point to reading great literature. We can get morals anywhere, mostly, even from the Internet, or from that old sinner Ben Franklin, if you wish. We know, for the most part, what we ought to do and ought not to do; we do not, however, know how to see into the human self unless the artist or poet really shows us, because he or she discovered it or saw it in the course of writing the work. Real Art then gives us something we can get nowhere else—an intuitive grasp of truth about the human condition, the human self. To put it another way, real Art lets us experience the mystery of our humanity whether we realize it or not.
Need an example? Read Henry James’ The Real Thing. The title of the short story is true in a number of ways, but it is especially true in pointing to what the story is really accomplishing. While I’m at it, the work of art that best embodies the Idea of Art that I will always have foremost in mind is Henry James’ The Figure in the Carpet. Perhaps more about both of these works later.
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I seem to have written myself into a box: truth, beauty, and goodness, I said about literature, because they make an excellent trio of companions, and because that is what Art is about, I thought. But goodness, what does goodness have to do with the work of art? What I had in mind was the analogy: God speaks the creation into being in Genesis; He proclaims that creation good. The artist “speaks” his or her creation into being, and it should be good, but it may or may not be good depending on the abilities of the author. Saying “goodness” felt right when I wrote it, but to understand it, I think I need to find it in an actual work of literature, say a Flannery O’Connor short story, one that is particularly concerned with being and that involves an artist as well: like Parker’s Back. Hmmm. First, I need the text before me.
