Great Books Archives - Page 5 of 26

Is Liberty a Means or an End?

Liberty is not the default state for a society. Looking at 16th century Italy in The Prince and the early years of the Roman Republic in Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli amply demonstrates liberty was indeed a very tenuous thing. Regardless of whether authority in a country is nominally lodged in a prince or the people, liberty is always at risk.

How, then, can a society achieve liberty? Having achieved it, how can liberty be preserved? Enter Machiavelli, who explains that since liberty does not arise and maintain itself, it needs the help of an enlightened ruler. He offers his counsel, like the friend who cares enough about you to tell you what you really do not want to hear. To enable a society to live in freedom requires someone willing to do hard, and often unpleasant, work.

How unpleasant in the work of establishing and maintaining liberty? You should not get into this business if you want to keep your hands clean. “This will always be known by those who read of ancient things: that after a change of state, either from republic to tyranny or from tyranny to republic, a memorable execution against the enemies of present conditions is necessary.” A memorable execution is necessary?

This essay is part of a symposium on “Machiavelli: Friend or Foe to Liberty?” Read the rest of this essay, the three essays by my fellow symposium participants, and the responses from all four of us at the Online Library of Liberty.

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Machiavelli, Niccolo Discourses on Livy “The Nice Machiavelli”
Mill, John Stuart On Liberty “The Rise and Decline of John Stuart Mill”

Diseased Politics and Politicized Disease

“Why do you assume you have the right to decide for someone else? Don’t you agree it’s a terrifying right, one that rarely leads to good? You should be careful. No one’s entitled to it, not even doctors.”
“But doctors are entitled to that right—doctors above all,” exclaimed Dontsova with deep conviction. By now she was really angry. “Without that right there’d be no such thing as medicine!”

Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that in Cancer Ward, first published in 1968. On the surface, the novel is a slice of life story set in a hospital. The semi-autobiographical central character, Oleg, is surrounded by an array of other patients undergoing treatments, mostly ineffective, for a terrifying disease. The nurses and doctors are overwhelmed, managing their frustrations with a mix of bravado and despair. The only true victor in the novel is cancer.

But the book is also a metaphor for society. Solzhenitsyn designed the metaphor to capture what was happening in the Soviet Union. But the book can also help us examine American society in the Age of COVID. Solzhenitsyn helps us understand the answer to a question that has surely crossed many minds since 2020: how did a biological disease turn into a political battle?

Read the rest at Public Discourse

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Aristotle Politics “Shall We talk About Politics?”
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A Sweet and Virtuous Soul

Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky;
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night,
For thou must die.

Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.

Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My music shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.

Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.

That is “Virtue” by George Herbert. The idea is intriguing. Of all the sweet things (day, rose, spring, soul), only the virtuous soul does not die. Virtue outlives the days and season. If you could give a gift to someone you love, it is far better to bequeath virtue than a rose.

Ah, but can you give virtue to another? Is virtue something which can be taught? Enter Socrates.

Meno by Plato is an extended attempt to answer that very question. Just like every time Socrates joins a conversation, the whole matter ends up being tied in more knots than you imagined could have existed. Indeed, this particular dialogue has a marvelous interaction (Jowett translation):

Meno O Socrates, I used to be told, before I knew you, that you were always doubting yourself and making others doubt; and now you are casting your spells over me, and I am simply getting bewitched and enchanted, and am at my wits’ end. And if I may venture to make a jest upon you, you seem to me both in your appearance and in your power over others to be very like the flat torpedo fish, who torpifies those who come near him and touch him, as you have now torpified me, I think. For my soul and my tongue are really torpid, and I do not know how to answer you; and though I have been delivered of an infinite variety of speeches about virtue before now, and to many persons—and very good ones they were, as I thought—at this moment I cannot even say what virtue is. And I think that you are very wise in not voyaging and going away from home, for if you did in other places as do in Athens, you would be cast into prison as a magician.
Socrates You are a rogue, Meno, and had all but caught me.
Meno What do you mean, Socrates?
Socrates I can tell why you made a simile about me.
Meno Why?
Socrates In order that I might make another simile about you. For I know that all pretty young gentlemen like to have pretty similes made about them—as well they may—but I shall not return the compliment. As to my being a torpedo, if the torpedo is torpid as well as the cause of torpidity in others, then indeed I am a torpedo, but not otherwise; for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself. And now I know not what virtue is, and you seem to be in the same case, although you did once perhaps know before you touched me. However, I have no objection to join with you in the enquiry.

I truly love that shtick when Socrates insists he is not confusing others, but rather that he is the one being confused. (I have been known to use that line on occasion in assorted classes and reading groups. The classics never go out of style.)

But, let’s see if we can clear up the confusion. Can virtue be taught? First off, we have to figure out what virtue is, which leads Meno into all sorts of trouble. We all know about virtue and we would have no trouble rattling off a list of virtues, but what is the definition of virtue itself? What is virtue in the abstract, not in the particular example, but the essence of virtue? What is it that quality which unites honesty and faithfulness and temperance and courage and so on? Good luck.

So, let’s take the easier question. Assuming we all know virtue when we see it, can we teach it? First, we have to find out if virtue is a form of knowledge. That is also a bit tricky. Surely virtue is something we can know, and is thus a form of knowledge. Then, if virtue is a form of knowledge, it can be taught. Thus, if virtue cannot be taught, it must not be a form of knowledge. Can virtue be taught? It is easy enough to teach someone about virtue. But, is teaching someone about honesty the same thing as teaching someone to be honest? Obviously not. Which is virtue? Knowing about honesty or being honest?

The challenge is thus to teach someone to be virtuous, not to know about virtue. Can that be done? How? Surely we can agree that to teach virtue, one must be virtuous. To teach knowledge, one must have the knowledge to be taught, so to teach virtue, doesn’t it follow that someone must have the virtue to be taught? Thus, we need to find virtuous people to see how virtue is taught. We suddenly run into another problem: virtuous people would surely want to teach others to be virtuous. In particular, virtuous people would want their own children to be virtuous, and thus would teach their children to be virtuous. But the children of virtuous people are not always virtuous. Does that mean virtue cannot be taught?

If virtue cannot be taught, how then do we learn to be virtuous? How do we even learn what constitutes virtue? Socrates’ conclusion? “To sum up our enquiry—the result seems to be, if we are at all right in our view, that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous.”

Now that is a rather fascinating conclusion. It is exactly the argument Paul makes in his letter to the Romans. Man rebels against God, and is hopelessly mired in an unvirtuous state.

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! (ESV)

Man’s nature cannot teach him virtue. Virtue cannot be acquired through any of his own efforts. Which causes Paul to exclaim: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” The answer: “To sum up our enquiry—the result seems to be, if we are at all right in our view, that virtue is neither natural nor acquired, but an instinct given by God to the virtuous.” Or as Paul actually put it: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Athens and Jerusalem once again point at the same conclusion.

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If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

“Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

“If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem to my chief joy.”

“When he saw the River again he knew it at once. He should have; it was now ineradicably a part of his past, his life; it would be a part of what he would bequeath, if that were in store for him. But four weeks later it would look different from what it did now and did: he (the old man) had recovered from his debauch, back in banks again, the Old Man, rimpling placidly toward the sea…”

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by William Faulkner. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem” is from Psalm 137:5.

Let’s start by talking about Faulkner’s book. Is it a novel? Hard to say. There are two seemingly totally unrelated stories in it. “The Wild Palms” and “Old Man” each have five sections. Does a book with sections alternating between two novellas constitute a novel? The method of construction here is intriguing. Faulkner did not write each story in turn. Instead, he wrote it just as it appears, alternating back and forth between each section.

It is easy to tell from reading the book, and is confirmed by Faulkner’s own account of the writing, that “The Wild Palms” is the primary story, while “Old Man” is there to slow the narrative down. (The book was originally published, over Faulkner’s objection, with the title The Wild Palms; apparently the publisher also had the same realization.) “The Wild Palms” is gripping, a sense of looming horror, told in flashback. We know from the first section that this story does not end well, sections 2-4 tell us how this situation arrived, and section 5 proceeds to the inevitable conclusion. The story leaps from one intense peak to another. “Old Man,” by contrast, has the lazy feel of a methodical story slowly unfolding itself. “The Wild Palms” reads like Sanctuary; “Old Man” reads like Absalom, Absalom!

The stories: “The Wild Palms” is the tale of a young doctor, nearing the end of his residency in New Orleans, who runs off with a married woman to Chicago. Then, just when they finally look like the might settle down there, they leave behind all hope of leading a normal lives and head off to a Utah mine, where things don’t work out well. She gets pregnant, so they head to the Mississippi coast, where he botches an abortion, and she also dies.

“Old Man” is the story of a Mississippi convict, in jail for a botched train robbery. A storm hits, and the Old Man River floods. The convicts are sent out to rescue some people who are stranded by the flood. The river has other ideas and our protagonist end up being washed away with one of the women (pregnant) he was sent out to rescue. He spends the rest of the story trying to get back to the authorities with both the boat he was provided and the women he was sent out to rescue.

The only narrative connection between these two stories is the jail in which both protagonists end up, but the commonality of the jail does not affect the stories at all. So, why are these two stories woven together? Either one can stand on its own. They could easily have been published just one after another as a set of two stories. Yet Faulkner not only interwove them in the publication; he wrote them like that. Clearly, they are connected in Faulkner’s mind.

Finding that connection would have been nearly impossible when the book was published under the title The Wild Palms. Faulkner’s title is the glue. No wonder he objected to renaming the book. With the proper title in place, it becomes apparent what Faulkner was doing here: he was writing a gloss on a poem.

The poem is Psalm 137, from which Faulkner’s title is drawn. Here it is in the King James Version:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

It is a striking poem, to put it mildly. A lament by someone hauled off to captivity in Babylon, full of pathos and anger. And when you look again at what Faulkner has done in this book, he is capturing the emotions of that poem.

The flooding Mississippi river, the Old Man River (read: the river of Babylon), has cut off the teller of the tale from all that he has known. He spends the story trying to get from the strange land in which he finds himself back to the jail. Is the jail his Zion? At the end of the story, we find out there is a deeper story. Our convict is in jail for the attempt to rob a train, but why did he want to commit that crime in the first place? There was a girl. Having read deeply in the crime novels of the day, the convict hoped to impress her with wealth and excitement. After he ends up in jail, the girl visits him just once before sending him a remarkably brutal postcard, reading “This is where were honnymonning at. You friend (Mrs) Vernon Waldrip.” The convict will never get back to his Zion: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”

“The Wild Palms” ends with the protagonist hanging up his harp in the wild palms of Mississippi; he will sing no more. In jail, he is provided (by the women’s husband) a cyanide pill, with which he can end his life. Faced with the decision between nothing and a life of grief, he chooses grief. Why? Grief maintains the ability to remember. Remembrance for the daughter of Babylon (read the whore of Babylon) with whom he ran off. “O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed.” Seeing the connection between story and psalm, the utterly chilling part hits with a wallop. “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” That was a false promise; the little one is killed, but no happiness ensues. And there in a jail next to the Mississippi River: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

As Eliot noted, poetry is bet when it is vaguely understood. That is exactly what Faulkner is doing in this remarkable book. Taken by themselves, these are two stories well worth reading when you want to settle into Faulknerian prose. But, once you see how the stories are interwoven with the sense of the Psalm, it becomes a haunting experience. You can read Psalm 137 and ponder it, but if you want to feel the Psalm in your bones, immerse yourself in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.

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Dante’s Road Trip: Paradise

After his travels through Hell and Purgatory, Dante arrives at Heaven.

O you, eager to hear more,
who have followed in your little bark
my ship that singing makes its way,

turn back if you would see your shores again.
Do not set forth upon the deep,
for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.
(Hollander’s translation)

After the brilliant and rather visceral discussions in the first two parts of The Divine Comedy, the reader eagerly anticipates what Date will do with heaven. But then, in yet another sign of Dante’s genius, Paradiso starts by basically saying if you don’t follow Dante in this journey, you have no hope. That is a really audacious claim, to put it mildly.

Then, just as the reader decides to take up Dante’s challenge and follow in his path through Heaven, the story launches into a discussion about the physical nature of outer space, which is not even remotely what anyone would expect. Dante told us this part was different, we don’t believe him, so he goes out of his way to prove his point. He is setting us up for all the philosophical and theological discussions which follow. It is almost like he is saying, “If you can make it through Canto 2, then maybe you can read this book.”

So much of the start here seems like a very deliberate attempt to leave the reader feeling disoriented and uncertain. As Dante keeps reminding us, words are literally incapable of describing what Dante has seen in heaven.

Cantos 3-5 give us the first glimpse of the levels of heaven. Here we get those who broke vows. But, unlike the discussion in the Inferno and Purgatorio, the discussion is not about the people in the circle and what they did. The discussion is a theological discussion of the nature of breaking vows. Is choosing life over martyrdom acceptable? No. If fear causes a weakening of our will are we to blame? Yes. Can we break vows? No. Can we modify the vows? Depends on whether we are modifying the thing that was promised or the form of the promise; only the first can be modified, and only by increasing the thing (by 50%, whatever that means). But then, some vows are so absurd, they should be broken—Agamemnon (not surprising) and Jephthah (really surprising).

What fascinates me about all this is not the details, but the fact that Dante is doing this in the first place. He is wading into theological debates and just casually relating the answers—and his answers must be the right ones because they come straight from Heaven itself! If we assume this is not a true story, then Dante is here asserting that he is the greatest theologian of all time, settling theological matters in a poem about a trip through heaven. Repeatedly through this work, Dante really is trying to put the scholastic theologians out of work.

The structure of Paradise is ascending upwards through space. Souls, which we discover all reside in the highest level with God, are reflected on the lower levels, which gives Dane the opportunely to engage is assorted theological discussions before arriving at the place where God Himself is.

I really like the Sun cantos. It fascinates me that Dante has Thomas, a Dominican, tell the story of the founder of the Franciscan order, and Bonaventure, a Franciscan, tell the story of the founder of the Dominican order. Thus, Dante works into a small space commentaries of four of the major theologians who immediately precede him, and in doing so, unites them all into one glorious whole. Then, of course, Dante has to go one step even further—Thomas, who hated metaphor, simile and any other poetic device, speaks in metaphors, similes and poetry that sound a whole lot like the way Dante writes—apparently Thomas realized that Dante was right about how to express philosophical truth. Thomas rambling on in Canto XIII is pretty funny. It reads a lot like Thomas Aquinas wrote…endless splitting of hairs, all presented like it is totally obvious when it is anything but obvious.

Then after getting to the starry spheres in Canto 22, Dante looks back at the path he has come along and realizes how small and unimportant the earth is compared to the place he is about to enter. In Canto 22 of the third part, Dante is saying, “nothing that came before is of interest.”

What matters? In canto 23, Dante is questioned in a manner resembling a catechism. It has nothing in it about Dante’s life on earth. After all the discussions along the way about the activities on earth, Peter just grills Dante (7 questions, of course) about the nature of faith. Then in the following cantos, Dante explains hope and love… straight out of 1 Corinthians: but now abide these three, Faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love. Before ascending, Dante must show his understanding of these things.

In the midst of this catechism, Dante is blinded (with a clear reference to Paul being blinded). Why does he become blind when he does? Hebrews defines faith as the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Dante describes faith and then hope and then can no longer see. It is only when he defines love that his sight is returned. And suddenly he can see Adam, the person created in the image of God, and thus created before sin entered the world. This is the closest any human has ever been to being like God (Eve was created from Adam). Thus faith, hope and love defined, sight is returned, and Dante can see God more clearly.

The last cantos are among the most amazing and beautiful things ever written. I don’t know how they can be read without longing for having the same experience that Dante describes. It is incredible how the excitement slowly builds as he lifts his eyes up higher and higher until he hits the vision which no words can explain. The end is absolutely brilliant. Any lesser writer would have included the journey back to earth and a promise to amend his ways or something; Dante ends on the highest imaginable point.

The absence of an explicit description of the appearance of God is also really amazing. There is a bit in Exodus, where God tells Moses, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” So, there is no description of God. Isaiah sees a vision of God and immediately exclaims, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” but he does not provide a description. In John’s vision, he says, “The One who sat on the throne looked like precious stones, like jasper and carnelian. All around the throne was a rainbow the color of an emerald.” That’s it. So, interestingly, Dante provides a more detailed description of God, but still leaves it totally incomplete from our perspective—as if to say, you just have to go see it yourself.

That perfectly captures what it is that I find so achingly beautiful about the whole work. It is obviously a work of fiction, but Dante sure seems to be trying to say something very real using the artifice of this journey. It’s like he is playing deeper game than the other Great Books writers—they write books to illustrate this or that aspect of life. Dante is trying to provide the most accurate explanation imaginable of that thing that animates and explains life, that thing that hovers just beyond human comprehension, by using a fictional journey to describe something which is both real and beyond words. There is nothing else like this, nothing really to which it can even be compared.

And perhaps not coincidentally, it is a work that no matter how many times I read it, I think I am still just scratching the surface of what it is saying.

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Dante’s Road Trip: Purgatory

If you mention Dante, most people who recognize the name instantly associate him with Inferno. It is actually quite surprising how few people even know that Inferno is just the first part of a larger work, The Divine Comedy.

(I know this because we had a dog named Dante, so I had many occasions to discover that when people heard the name of the dog, they instantly mentioned Inferno, having no idea there was more to Dante. Proof by anecdote!)

Dante tours Hell in part 1, but then in part 2 he wanders up the mountain of Purgatory, before getting to Heaven in Part 3. It isn’t hard to see why Inferno is the most well-known part. It gets the dual benefit of being the start of the story, so people would naturally read it first, and being full of gruesome punishments for sins. Why nobody has taken advantage of the gory details of the Inferno to make some modern horror blockbuster is totally beyond me.

The structure of Purgatory is interesting. In the Inferno, the sins are organized along Aristotelian lines and the punishments are the literal extensions of the sins. The message: you chose to live like this in life and so now you can live like this for all eternity.

Purgatory is organized on Christian lines, with levels representing the Seven Deadly Sins. The sins are all variations on loving wrong. The three lower levels (Pride, Envy, Wrath) are love of the wrong thing—varieties of love of self. The three upper levels (Avarice and Prodigality, Gluttony, Lust) are love in the right general direction, but lacking appropriate moderation. The middle level (Sloth) is just a deficiency of love. Then add in two levels before you get to Purgatory Proper—the excommunicated and the late repentant; people in these circles have to spend a lot of time hanging around before they are let into Purgatory Itself. Then, at the very top of the mountain is Eden, the last stop before being purged of all sin and heading off to Paradise.

While the punishments in the Inferno are all logical extensions of the sin stripped to its essence, the punishments in Purgatory force the soul to stop engaging in the sin. So, for example, in the circle of Pride, the souls are forced to carry large weights on their backs, causing the souls to look down at the ground, remembering that they are not God, but rather grounded beings created by God. In the circle of Lust, the souls constantly give one anther chaste kisses, showing love without carnality.

In the Inferno, souls were confined to a particular level forever; in Purgatory, the souls go from one level to the next as they purge themselves of sin after sin. The amount of time a soul spends on each level is proportional to how prevalent the sin was in the person’s life. This leads to one of my favorite bits in the entire Divine Comedy.

When he is talking with people in the circle of Envy, Dante says he won’t spend much time there, but he will spend a lot of time in the circle of Pride. It’s not only funny, but it is deep: the reason Dante does not Envy is because he is so full of Pride. Indeed, even saying how little time he will spend in the circle of Envy is an example of his Pride. Then later in the circle, Dante is chastised because his eyes are still looking on the ground instead of upward. Looking at the ground is exactly what the souls are doing in the circle of Pride. Dante falters because being in the circle of Envy increased his Pride. But here is the really interesting part; Dante’s pride is seen as he constantly talks about himself in this work as if he is the greatest poet of all time. This very poem is why he is so proud. But, 700 years later one thing is pretty obvious; Dante is, in fact, the greatest poet of all time. (OK, maybe Shakespeare beats him.)

Throughout Purgatory, Dante does a masterful job weaving in Biblical imagery and making it his own. For example, early on, Dante gets to the gate of Purgatory and encounters angels. What follows morphs the story from Genesis of the angel being posted at the gate of Eden to keep the humans out. Dante sees the angels and then suddenly a serpent shows up and Dante is terrified. It seems a bit frightening, but that is because Dante forgot about the angels, who easily beat back the serpent; there was actually never any danger from the serpent. Here in Dante the angels are posted at the gate of Purgatory (within which is Eden itself) not to keep humans out, but to keep the serpent out.

There are lots of things like that. At one point, we hear a reciting of something a whole lot like the Lord’s Prayer, but Dante rewrote it to make it more artful. As Dante says in another place:
Reader, you surely understand that I am raising
the level of my subject here. Do not wonder,
therefore, if I sustain it with more artifice.

(That is the Hollanders’ translation, far and away the best translation of Dante. Both the translation itself and the notes are outstanding.)

When Dante gets to Eden, there is a masterpiece of taking the visions of John, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Daniel and working out a new vision with exactly the same sort of poetic metaphor inherent in every part. It feels like reading the Biblical authors, but it is a unique picture. In what may be the most brilliant thing in the whole story, Dante wades into a discussion on whether the angelic beings have four or six wings. Any normal person would have noted that John (who said six) and Ezekiel (who said four) needed an independent observer to decide and now that Dante has seen them, John was right. Instead, the narrative says that Dante and Ezekiel disagree and notes that John has said that Dante was right. Dante’s vision is thus not just in the style of the Biblical visions; Dante’s vision is more credible and accurate than those visions. The Biblical writers are imitating Dante!

Then there is another vision at the very end that seems like a mash-up of the book of Daniel and Virgil’s Aeneid. Both Daniel and Virgil provide visions of the sweep of human history. Daniel’s vision, according to Christian commentaries, ends at the time of Christ. Virgil’s vision-narrative happens when Aeneas is in Hades and ends with the time of Augustine. Dante’s vision ends with the harlot and the beast, which is ripped right out of John’s Revelation and is the very last thing in Revelation before heading off to an eternal heaven. So, once again Dante is ripping off all the source texts and making something shockingly original.

Speaking of Virgil, he also plays a fascinating role in Purgatory. Dante had him as a guide through Inferno, but Virgil keeps plodding along with Dante through Purgatory. Since Virgil is a permanent resident of Limbo in the Inferno, why is he Dante’s guide? Why doesn’t Dante get a Christian guide? It is only in the Canto XXII of Purgatory (over half-way through the entire Divine Comedy) that we get an answer. Dante and Virgil have met Statius, an Italian poet of some note. Statius explains that he found Christianity by reading Virgil, who is described as a guy who has the light behind his back which does no good for Virgil, but much good for those who came after. Dante was playing a long game in setting this up. Just as Virgil led Statius, he now leads Dante…but only Virgil’s followers benefit from the light Virgil provides.

I suspect, by the way, that Dante drops Statius in here to draw a flattering comparison to himself. Suddenly there is another poet who used Virgil as a muse who is traveling through Purgatory…but Statius is acknowledging his inferiority to Virgil, whereas Dante in a million ways keeps pointing out how much better he is than Virgil.

When they get to Eden, Virgil explains that the journey is done. That is odd. We know there is a whole part remaining. But from Virgil’s perspective, there are just the two journeys. Once you hit the end of the climb up the mountain of Purgatory, Paradise awaits…journey is done. And now Virgil gets to head back down to the Inferno.

We the Readers, however, get to keep traveling with Dante as he journeys up toward Paradise. But before doing so, it is well worth pausing to admire the masterpiece that is Purgatory. It is a perfect bridge; as we find out in the next part, there is a massive difference between Heaven and Hell (obviously not the most shocking revelation), but Dante with supreme art blends the characteristics of the Inferno and Paradise in crafting Purgatory. The Inferno is marked by literally hellish landscapes. Purgatory is full of descriptions of exquisite beauty. By the time we get to the overwhelming beauty of Eden, it is jarring to think back to the horrors of the Inferno.

Harold Bloom declared that Purgatory was his favorite section of The Divine Comedy because it was the only section on earth itself. Presumably he said this for the shock value (Bloom was like that), but nevertheless, he was pointing to something real. The Inferno is the worst of humanity; Paradise is the best. Purgatory is the muddled mess of life, the lives we are all actually living. Things aren’t perfect yet, but if you look around, you’ll notice those hints of paradise lurking in the landscape. Notice the beauty of the steps leading into Purgatory which gives hints of heaven. Then notice that such glimpses are all around you right now.

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