Literary Giants Literary Catholics (51 page)

The concord between me and my colleagues was hardly surprising. The
Divine Comedy
is such a magnificent achievement that it has no equal within the sphere of poetry. It is a literary edifice that towers over its rivals. As such, the question from the audience was almost superfluous. After all, what’s the point of asking a question to which only one answer is possible? I was reminded, in fact, of T. S. Eliot’s judgment on Dante: “I feel that anything I can say about such a subject is trivial. I feel so completely inferior in his presence—there seems really nothing to do but to point to him and be silent.”
¹
If the greatest poet of the twentieth century was rendered speechless in the presence of the medieval master, what hope was there for three mere “experts”? Like Eliot, we had little option but to point to Dante and be silent. Such was the apt if somewhat anticlimactic end to our discussion of Christian poetry.

In spite of his own cautionary words on the subject, Eliot did not always remain silent. In
The Sacred Wood
, he wrote that “Dante’s is the most comprehensive, and the most
ordered
presentation of emotions that has ever been made.”
²
He also insisted that Dante was superior to Milton, dismissing the latter’s claim as a worthy contender or pretender to the Italian’s crown. “Dante seems to me so immeasurably greater in every way, even in control of language, that I am often irritated by Milton’s admirers.”
³

As usual, I find myself in essential agreement with Eliot. The difference between these two great poets, Dante and Milton, is truly abysmal, in the sense that an abyss separates them. It is an abyss that is analogous to the chasm that separates heaven from hell. One does not need to agree wholeheartedly with William Blake’s assertion that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” to agree nonetheless with his judgment that “Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell”. Whether or not Milton truly had sympathy for the devil, he certainly gave him many of the best lines.

The difference between Milton and Dante can be summarized succinctly. Milton’s approach is devious, deviant, even devilish; Dante’s is divine. Milton’s focus is principally infernal, concentrating on infernal principalities and powers; Dante’s is always on paradise, even when he is in hell. Milton’s heaven is a military dictatorship with Satan as the leader of an army of rebel freedom fighters; Dante’s heaven is a communion of saints living in harmony within a hierarchy of virtue, moved by Love. Milton points to hell, even from heaven; Dante points to heaven, even from hell. Milton descends from the positive to the negative; Dante ascends from the negative to the positive. Milton’s is the tragedy of a Paradise Lost; Dante’s the comedy of a Paradise Attained.

If modernity does not perceive the profound difference between these two masterful poets, it is not particularly surprising. Modernity does not perceive
anything
very profoundly, least of all those things that are truly profound. The cry of the
De profundis
cannot be heard by the moderns because in order to cry
de profundis
, one must first have some perception of the depth from which one is crying. Paradoxically, modernity cannot cry from out of the depths because it is out of its depth. It simply does not understand the deeper things.

This lack of insight on the part of the modern world, particularly within the context of a discussion of the importance of Dante, was expressed by Chesterton with his customary eloquence.

If we compare . . . the morality of the
Divine Comedy
with the morality of Ibsen’s
Ghosts
, we shall see all that modern ethics have really done. No one, I imagine, will accuse the author of the
Inferno
of an Early Victorian prudishness or a Podsnapian optimism. But Dante describes three moral instruments—Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the vision of perfection, the vision of improvement, and the vision of failure. Ibsen has only one—Hell.
⁴

The irony, of course, is that modernity is left with hell because it has rejected Purgatory and heaven. And this takes us from Ibsen back to Milton. As a fanatical Puritan, Milton had rejected the medieval vision of heaven and Purgatory. Perhaps indeed he “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell” precisely because he despised Dante’s vision of the Church Triumphant and the Church Suffering. The Puritans condemned the Catholic veneration of the saints and rejected the very existence of Purgatory. Quite simply, heaven and Purgatory, as Dante envisioned them, were “off limits” to Milton. He could not write of saints, nor of repentant souls being cleansed of their sins. He was left with hell. Having rejected the vision of success (heaven) and the vision of improvement on the path to success (Purgatory), he is left only with the vision of failure (hell). What, ultimately, is
Paradise Lost
but a vision of failure?

Like Milton and Ibsen, the modern world is more at home in hell than in heaven. It is where it wants to be. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that Dante’s
Inferno
is far more widely read than the
Purgatorio
or the
Paradiso
. For most moderns, even those who profess to teach literature at our centers of higher learning (so-called), Dante is often seen as “the poet of the
Inferno
”. Not only is this the only part of the
Divine Comedy
that is studied, it is generally considered to be far superior as literature to the other two books. The absurdity of such a position, literarily speaking, beggars belief. It beggars belief not so much because the
Purgatorio
and the
Paradiso
are better as literature (though it can certainly be argued convincingly that they are at least the
Inferno
’s equal) but because they are all part of the same book. Imagine the absurdity of suggesting that Tolkien’s
The Fellowship of the Ring
was superior to
The Two Towers
or
The Return of the King
, so much so that it was considered unnecessary to read the whole of
The Lord of the Rings
. Imagine the absurdity of suggesting that the first book of Waugh’s
Brideshead Revisited
was superior to the second and third books and that, therefore, it was necessary to study only the first third of the novel. Imagine the suggestion that it is necessary to read only the first third of any book in order to understand it! Yet, astounding though it may seem, this is exactly the way in which the
Divine Comedy
is often studied.

The full extent of the absurdity is made apparent once we perceive the work as a whole and not as three distinct books. Taken as a whole, the
Divine Comedy
depicts the ascent of the spirit of assent, the soul’s slow but sure acceptance of the will of God. It begins, however, with the descent of the spirit of dissent, the soul’s obstinate rejection of the divine will. The deeper the dissent, the deeper the descent until, at last, we find ourselves with the traitors in the diabolic presence of Satan himself. The vision thus far is all negative, rooted in rejection of the will of God. It is, however, only the preamble, only the prelude or the prologue to the ascent and assent that follows. From now on, the soul ascends Mount Purgatory and from thence is lifted into the spheres of heaven itself and, finally, into the very presence of the beatific vision. Seen in this context, the descent into Hell is the
diminuendo
that accentuates the increasing power of the
crescendo
that follows it. Remove the
crescendo
, and the
diminuendo
is devoid of ultimate purpose.

Perhaps it takes a Catholic sensibility to understand fully the
Divine Comedy
, and this perhaps is the reason for modernity’s failure to comprehend this greatest of all poems. At any rate, it takes a great Catholic like Chesterton to elucidate fully the lucidity of Dante’s vision. Take, for instance, Chesterton’s comparison of Dante to Shakespeare.

Do we not know in our hearts that Shakespeare could have dealt with Dante’s Hell but hardly with Dante’s Heaven? In so far as it is possible to be greater than anything that is really great, the man who wrote of Romeo and Juliet might have made something even more poignant out of Paolo and Francesca. The man who uttered that pulverizing “He has no children”, over the butchery in the house of Macduff, might have picked out yet more awful and telling words for the father’s cry out of the Tower of Hunger. And when Dante is really dealing with the dance of the liberated virtues in the vasty heights of heaven, he is spacious. He is spacious when he talks of Liberty; he is spacious when he talks of Love. It is so in the famous words at the end about Love driving the sun and stars; it is the same in the far less famous and far finer passage, in which he hails the huge magnanimity of God in giving to the human spirit the one gift worth having; which is Liberty. Nobody but a fool will say that Shakespeare was a pessimist; but we may, in this limited sense, say that he was a pagan; in so far that he is at his greatest in describing great spirits in chains. In that sense, his most serious plays are an inferno. Anyhow, they are certainly not a
Paradiso
.
⁵

Although I can’t concur with Chesterton’s conclusion that some of Shakespeare’s plays were an inferno, believing instead that they were in fact a
purgatorio
, his insistence on Dante’s superiority as a visionary of paradise is utterly valid. Nor can one argue with Chesterton’s ultimate appraisal of Dante’s munificent and magnificent accentuation of the positive: “Dante is drawn as a dark and bitter spirit; but in fact he wrote the only one of the great epics that really has a happy ending.”
⁶

The final word on Dante’s masterpiece belongs not to Eliot, nor to Chesterton, but to Chesterton’s great friend, Maurice Baring. A greatly underrated novelist and poet in his own right, Baring has captured better than anyone the love of liberty and the liberty of love at the heart-leaping core of the
Divine Comedy
, the assent’s ascent.

Scaling the circles of the
Paradiso
, we are conscious the whole time of an ascent not only in the quality of the substance but in that of the form. It is a long perpetual crescendo, increasing in beauty until the final consummation in the very last line. Somebody once defined an artist . . . as a man who knew how to finish things. If this definition is true—and I think it is—then Dante was the greatest artist who ever lived. His final canto is the best, and it depends on and completes the beginning.
⁷

60

_____

Good Will for All Men

A
S AN ENGLISHMAN
, I must confess an element of pride (in the nontheological sense!) at the very mention of the name of William Shakespeare. The knowledge that my country has spawned, nurtured and nourished such a genius is certainly a cause for joy. It is, however, a little presumptuous to feel proud about something for which one deserves no credit. One might as well feel proud or superior because one is the offspring of rich parents. The baby, fresh from the womb of a wealthy mother, has clearly not merited the silver spoon that he has inherited any more than the newborn babe of penurious parents deserves censure for the plastic spoon with which it is fed. Clearly, therefore, we Englishmen have not
merited
the honor of calling William Shakespeare our fellow countryman. Nonetheless, he
is
our fellow countryman, and we have the right—nay, the duty—to feel grateful for this fortuitous gift. It is, indeed, the sort of fortuitousness that breeds fortitude. After all, if we can call Shakespeare our countryman, shouldn’t it inspire us to emulate his example, however imperfectly?

Shakespeare is, however, not merely or only an Englishman. He is no more
merely
English than Dante is
merely
Italian, Cervantes
merely
Spanish or Dostoyevsky
merely
Russian. He was, and they were, spawned, nurtured and nourished by something greater than their respective nationalities. They were all children of Christendom, inheritors of the seed of Christ. They were cultivated by the grace of God Himself and grew to creative fruition in the profound culture of the Church. As such, they are catholic and Catholic. Their appeal is universal. They speak nothing less than the language of Truth. They speak to Everyman in a powerful language that Everyman understands. Thus Shakespeare the Englishman is also Shakespeare for Everyman, regardless of Everyman’s nationality. Shakespeare is for sharing!

There is, however, a problem that comes with this liberality. There is the danger—nay, the inevitability—that the Shakespearean pearls will be cast before swine. So be it. The swine will not be harmed by it. It might even do them some good! Even relativists may come through relatively unharmed! They might even find themselves relatively cured of their relativism. Perhaps, however, this is merely wishful thinking. There are none so blind, as the saying goes . . . I suspect, in fact, that the only people more blind than those who will not see are those who see only what they want to see!

I am reminded—if I might be permitted a brief peripatetic aside—of the exchange between Chesterton, the prophet of absolute or gospel truth, and Holbrook Jackson, a preacher of relative or secularist opinion:

     
Jackson: A lie is that which you do not believe
.

     Chesterton: This is a lie: so perhaps you don’t believe it.

     
Jackson: As soon as an idea is accepted it is time to reject it
.

     Chesterton: No: It is time to build another idea on it. You are always rejecting: and you build nothing.