Key to All Mythologies

Some questions discussed in this episode:

Some questions discussed in this episode:

We are now through Cato’s gate, and into the antechamber, the incorporeal coat-room, the final stage before Purgatory proper. Dante moves among the penitents as they receive their just punishments, and serve their allotted waiting times, before they can slowly make their way up the mountain, and eventually to Heaven. We discuss the delicate interplay of light and darkness, of faith in the unseen and clarity of vision, and of certainty and doubt, which this painstaking crawl of redemption inspires. Bonus thoughts: We also think about what role beauty plays in religious art.

We continue our climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Canto Four begins with a consideration of the meaning of prayer for the process of purgation. God, we are told, cannot hear the prayers of those passing through Purgatory, but their time on the mountain can be shortened by the prayers of the living. We discuss this rather strange piece of doctrine. Given what we learned in Hell about the very precise nature of divine justice, doesn’t this violate or circumvent it somehow? Or is this an argument for the God-granted power of the human mind, and the importance of community within Christianity?

We also discuss the importance of paying attention. Dante seems to suggest here, in an almost proto-Existentialist way, that certain aspects of reality are revealed through attentiveness that can’t be discovered any other way. Does this connect to these Canto’s focus on prayer? Finally, we consider again Dante’s political commitments. Can his longing after the perfect monarch be squared with his metaphysics? Is it incurably naïve, or are we just being decadent moderns? Is the naivety with him or with us? 

We join Dante and Virgil as they begin their climb up the mountain of Purgatory. Why is Cato, a pagan who lived before Christ and died by suicide, the honored guardian of that mountain? Does he have access to Heaven? If so, why only him and no other “virtuous pagans” (including Virgil)? We also reflect on the tragedy and meaning of Virgil’s fate, and what this fate might say about his supposed status as the Divine Comedy’s embodiment of human reason. Finally, we talk about Dante’s larger plan for the Comedy. What is his grand vision of Christianity and the Christian life? And is this vision meant comfort us, or disturb us?

We arrive at the end of the Inferno, where Satan is frozen in a lake of ice. Dante’s Satan is a mechanistic creature, seemingly without agency, personality, or voice. His main function is to sit at the center of Hell, the lowest point in Dante’s hierarchical universe, where the flapping of his six wings freezes the landscape around him, and to allow Dante and Virgil to use his body as a ladder to climb up and out of Hell.

He is, to say the least, not charming, duplicitous, playful, or mocking. The most life-like thing about him are the tears he continually cries. What is the meaning of these tears? Is Satan expressing sorrow or regret, rage, or pain, some other emotion – or is he just cold. In a poem full of memorable characters and self-aggrandizing monologues, why is Evil’s most famous representative a blank – more of an object than a living being. What does this tell us about Dante’s sense of Evil and Goodness, and about the many questions of poetry, rhetoric, representation, and power we have discussed throughout the Inferno? Can we conceive of a Satan who spoke his piece and did not emit at least a touch of rebellious glamour?

We are now deep in Hell. Two of the sinners we encounter in canto 29 introduce a new wrinkle to the poem’s psychology. They seem to have some degree of self-knowledge about the justice of their punishment, or at least they refer to their own punishment as fitting. What does it mean to have self-knowledge post-damnation? It can’t be that sinner’s learn once condemned to Hell, can it? Is total self-knowledge equivalent to a complete severing from God’s being? Why is forgery a sin punished so deep in the pit? And why is it’s contrapasso that the forger is made too heavy to move, and tormented by images of lovely, flowing rivers?

We also discuss the meaning of being entertained by the grotesque scenes of torture and demonic slapstick throughout the Inferno. Is the only purpose of these scenes to deliver moral lessons, and could you deliver the lessons without the moral dangers posed by the base entertainments? How does Dante respond to the artistic and rhetorical challenges posed by the obvious fact that it is more fun to think and talk about Hell than about Heaven? Or is this merely a problem for us decadents moderns, and not one for Dante and his contemporary readers who, presumably, had no lack of faith in the very real existence of the afterlife and its fiery punishments?

Today we discuss Dante and Virgil’s encounter with Ulysses. The Greek hero gives a cavalier and almost rousing account of himself, spit from the flames eternally consuming him deep in the pits of Hell. Dante’s Ulysses recounts himself extending his famous wanderings beyond Ithaca, and out to the edge of the world, where God sends a whirlwind to destroy him and his ships. Of his wanderlust he says “not tenderness for a son, nor filial duty towards my aged father, nor the love I owed Penelope, that would have made her glad, could overcome the fervor that was mine to gain experience of the world.”

With these words, we as readers must confront a problem we have encountered a few times already in this poem. What, if anything, distinguished the journey of Ulysses from the journey of Dante the pilgrim? And, by implication, what distinguishes Dante Christian epic from his predecessor’s pagan ones? Is his all-encompassing humanism a kind of romantic heroism? Or merely fine rhetoric dressing up selfishness and everyday vanity? His speech is brief and its conclusion – as is the conclusion of his voyage – is abrupt and flat. If Dante’s purpose with this was to limit the possible spell the always spell-binding Ulysses could cast on the reader, he seems to have failed, since we spend almost our whole conversation weighing the possible meanings of the ancient hero’s handful of lines. There may be progress in some human affairs – but there is never any on the Key to All Mythologies.

Today we take up a set of thorny questions surrounding the punishment of hypocrites in the 8th circle of the Inferno. What forms of corruption pollute the human spirit and the human community in especially damaging ways? What are the implications of the ease with which the demons in this circle trick Virgil, supposedly the embodiment of human reason? We also consider the meaning of a strange episode where one of the damned plots to briefly escape from his torments by fleeing the pitchforks of the demons who surround him. Is there playfulness in Hell? The sinners throughout the circles of the Inferno are not will-less, apathetic husks – they still want things, they still have goals, and they still see themselves through Dante’s eyes, and try to affect his image of them. What is the meaning of will in a changeless place? Comedy? Poetic freedom? Or a further, subtler form of punishment? All this and more, on this episode of the Key.