James E Hartley

The Inherent Virtues of Commerce

“Dear Cleinias, the class of men is small . . . who, when assailed by wants and desires, are able to hold out and observe moderation, and when they might make a great deal of money are sober in their wishes, and prefer a moderate to a large gain. But the mass of mankind are the very opposite: their desires are unbounded, and when they might gain in moderation they prefer gains without limit; wherefore all that relates to retail trade, and merchandise, and the keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonorable things.”

That is Plato in the Laws. He is outdone by Aristotle who in the Politics advocates banning any merchants from the state, since “such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue.” It isn’t just the Greeks who disparage commerce. Aquinas says that a merchant who works to enrich himself is a rather despicable creature, “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity.”

One of the interesting things about reading old books is how modern they sometimes seem. You don’t dig very deep into Left or Right political commentary to find remarks disparaging the multinational industrial capitalist economy. The Left wants to replace it with some sort of edenic international socialist state. The Right wants to replace it with some sort of edenic national religious state.

But both conservative and liberal market critics claim that large corporations are being run by greedy CEOs who care only about becoming mind-bogglingly wealthy, tossing the concerns of the poor working classes into the ashbins. Indeed, these capitalist swine in pursuit of riches do what they can to corrupt the government and thwart the will of all those decent not-so-wealthy people who just want to live satisfying lives.

But a profit motive does not necessarily entail systematic social corruption as ancient and modern naysayers of open markets suggest. An individual working in the economic order does not cease to be a moral person simply because he has a profit motive. It is possible to run an ethical business—to treat your employees and customers the right way, the way you would like to be treated yourself—and still generate profits.

Can the case for commercial activity be made stronger? Is there a fundamental answer to the charges of immorality leveled by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and their modern counterparts? Is it possible to argue that commercial activity is inherently virtuous, that it does not need to be tolerated as a necessary evil, but rather should be embraced as a positive good?

Read the rest at Public Discourse

Can Sober Smithians Soften Polarized Partisans?

The centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Yeats’ lines seem to have a particular resonance these days.

One of the most frequent laments about the state of modern politics is the rise of polarization. Where, people ask, is the spirit of compromise, the willingness to come together to get things done? Each side blames the polarization on the other. Those who feel trapped in No Man’s Land frequently point to the rise of social media with its separate closed ecosystems.

Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a different explanation for the polarization, an explanation which suggests there is nothing new under the sun.

Read the rest at Adam Smith Works

The Lonely Ones

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Sometime in the early 2020s, humans managed to eradicate themselves in a giant nuclear conflagration.

Well, fortunately, “eradication” is not entirely correct. A few remnants of humanity were able to move off-world. Fortunately, between 1999 and 2005, humans colonized Mars. Well, fortunately for the humans; it was not quite so fortunate for the Martians.

It’s funny how science fiction written in the 1940s seems so wildly off in its forecasts of the future. As you may have noticed, Mars wasn’t colonized by 2005. We do still have time to have a giant nuclear conflagration before 2026, though, so maybe the book isn’t totally off. Oh, don’t worry. The international situation is so remarkably stable, there is no chance at all of a giant world war. The book is just wrong.

The book? Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

First question: is this a novel or a collection of short stories? I have no idea. It sits right in no man’s land. It is clearly a whole bunch of bits written as stand alone short stories which are organized temporally and interspersed with brief little bits of connecting tissue in the form of one page vignettes. So, there is an overall story line through the book, but each substantive chapter could be ripped out of the book and read with absolutely zero loss of ability to understand the story.

As a story, it definitely has some clever bits. The book is easily divided into thirds. At first humans start arriving on Mars, and shockingly the Martians don’t seem too happy to see the humans. Conflict ensues. The Humans win (yeah for the humans!). Then we get a bunch of stories in which Mars is an unknown territory far from earth and the human settlements have all sorts of problems. Then the people on earth manage to destroy themselves and so life on Mars becomes the last refuge of humanity.

Now Bradbury is a fine writer and some of the stories are clever and fun, but is there any reason to read a bunch of 1940s science fiction if you aren’t unnaturally obsessed with post war apocalyptic imaginations about other worlds?

Yes.

The always amazing Library of America recently published the first volume of Bradbury’s writings. At the end of this volume is a brief essay Bradbury wrote helpfully entitled “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles.” In it he relates how he came to write these stories. The idea started as Winesburg, Ohio set on Mars, which he fortunately abandoned because, well, Sherwood Anderson already wrote a book called Winesburg, Ohio, and it is really good and so why rewrite the same book?

What was he going to write instead?

It was going to be about people and they were going to be lonely people. They could not help being lonely, for they were double damned; once by a civilization that yanked the base out from under their God, and tried to take their mind off their loss with nylon toothbrushes and V-8 engines, and again by the impossible total miles between Earth and Mars.

That is exactly what The Martian Chronicles is all about. Every single story hammers home in one way or another, the unbearable problem of how to find a connection with another. The early explorers show up desperately hoping to be welcomed by the Martians and the tragedy is that the Martians have no interest in becoming companions of these lonely Earthmen. Eventually, humans take out their frustration at being so lonely so far from earth by asserting their control over Mars, hoping to build a place for humans to be in community, but once the Martians are gone, the loneliness remains. And then the humans on Earth use their new-found toys to destroy each other and the book ends with “The Million-Year Picnic” on Mars, where a few straggling remnants of humans trying desperately to build a community.

The Martian Chronicles is indeed a novel.

Who are these lonely people? This is the question which makes the novel truly fascinating. Also from “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles”:

[In] my home in Illinois there was a man who prowled the streets in the year 1928, who was known as “the lonely one.” I have never forgotten him. Some day his sons, or the sons of his sons, will go to Mars. Eliot calls them The Hollow Men. Call them what you will, but there they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking they will find a planet like a seer’s crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they’ll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.

About whom are we reading when we read The Martian Chronicles? It is a mirror. Those lonely people? They are us, living in Eliot’s Wasteland, headpieces filled with straw. Alas.

The loneliness bred in the modern age is a subject which has been widely discussed. I teach at a college with a couple thousand students living in crowded dormitories, and yet, “lonely” is a pretty good adjective to describe most of my students. What happens when a bunch of lonely people are put together in a place? Well, all sorts of attempts to form deep bonds emerge, most of which do not actually generate such bonds, and thus the loneliness increases.

The Martian Chronicles is a taxonomy of failed means of trying to solve the problem of loneliness. Story after story, we just keep seeing yet one more way the quest to cure loneliness has failed. In the end, we destroy ourselves.

That sounds kinda depressing. And indeed, while the stories in Bradbury’s volume are entertaining, there is not a lot of hope here. I suppose that should be obvious in a book in which the most famous story (“There Will Be Soft Rains”), the penultimate chapter in the novel, is the tale of an automated house continuing to hum along making breakfast and so on for a family that is now just a shadow on a wall created by a nuclear explosion. And then the automation in the house breaks down, and even the house dies in a fire. The final chapter is the million year long picnic on Mars…maybe that will work out? Yeah, probably not.

What is the cure for loneliness? Bradbury doesn’t have an answer. He drives that point home by ending the last story in the book with an ellipsis; it just wanders off into the unknown. Bradbury is writing stories trying to convince you that there is a problem, that you are indeed lonely and that you don’t have a cure for your loneliness. Bradbury is silently whispering in your ear: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Bradbury short stories are good, but here is a great example of the whole being better than the sum of the parts. I read his book decades ago and thought it was ho-hum. Some nice stories, no real cohesion. I was wrong. As a reflection on how humans try and fail to cure themselves of loneliness, it is rather amazing. Read this book, and then look around the world, and you suddenly see: it’s just The Martian Chronicles repeating itself here on Earth.

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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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