As many and better lights have done so before, I’ve toyed with the idea of updating Dante. It would be fun, wouldn’t it?, to excoriate cultural dreck by taking up Minos’ art. The Inferno, even using the Poet’s present schema, without much alteration, would make for a resonant mythification of the modern age – perhaps the only truly Christian and valid work of “mythopoeia.” I’d use Patristics as the theological backbone, and Rieff for sociology. Barfield and Williams (Chas., that is), and maybe even Seraphim Rose can help out with that rather unsettling psycho-linguistic event at the gates of Dis.
Well, enough with the hints. I’ll get to work. Don’t hold your breath.
Il Purgatorio presents a harder challenge, but it can be done. I never really took the ascent up the excavation of Hell as a literal map of the afterlife, and I would like to think that Dante meant this, too. Purgatory depicts the Church’s purgative therapy for the passions in this life, and the attainment of entrance into the physical Paradise regained – a goal that is sought and reached by the Saints (who have experienced the grace of theosis).
I'm a big believer in sentimental news about saints conversing with bears, and monks on Athos holding forth to small creatures that usually get felled by buckshot. It is a better Eden than Milton's (which, by the way, is slated for the big screen).
But what beats me, and what turns out to be impossible for revision, is Il Paradiso. Dante had hopes for the Holy Roman Empire, and he still, perhaps with some naiveté, dreamt of Justinian’s Byzantium. Dante clearly wrote Paradiso as a picture, or “narrative,” of “Christ and culture in synthesis” (to use Niebuhr’s helpful analysis). Christendom, in this analysis, was to be the converted Roman state, surrounding each earthly life with the Christian power of priest and king. And that state was rooted in the heavenly reality of Christ’s contemporary millennial reign.
It is a pretty picture, especially framed in stars and heralded by eagles and Crosses. It was a picture, during the historic phenomenon of “Christendom,” that felt real. In those days, phenomena of culture, even government, actually resonated with metaphysical reference: that was then, but today, it is no longer the case.
Dante, one of the great Masters of Affirmation, would be hard-pressed to poetize about a society as thoroughly de-mythologized as ours. And, as we all know, poetry requires myth, as myth requires some sense, or open-mindedness, of the beyond (i.e., metaphysics).
The only remnant of the metaphysical witness that remains in the groupthink we know as Western culture is the nightmarish tremens that comes from sublimity. One of the best gauges I know that shows the miles we've departed from GK's world is the completely goofy gag he made, often, about how perfectly chummy and cozy the universe was, rather like a cheery pub that encourages decent conversation. "Nice little place You've got here," he said, implicitly, to the Ineffable One when he got upstairs to look around.
Nothing impious was meant. GK really meant to be nice, because, as you get to know him, this sort of "chumminess" was the very best of his compliments.
And perhaps it is mainly because there is no sacredness, no vestige of the Christian metaphysic so celebrated by Dante and GK, that the universe looks so stark, so abysmally terrible, blinding, silent and deaf. There is a metaphysic of the sublime, but it is a postmodern one, and because of that, it is absolutely useless for art.
Il Paradiso is impossible to write in a language that’s been dredged of metaphysic. And where Paradise can no longer be described, except in demonic counterfeits like drug-induced or sexual or Amway/megachurch ecstasies, then Paradise can not be reached.
So with regard to Dante updates from this end, forget Paradiso. That’s way too hard.
But the Inferno? That’s a different story. Paradiso was always difficult, and now it's impossible to retell. The Inferno was never so hard. In fact, it's getting easier by the year.
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