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their metaphorical meanings are extended very specifically through a whole work. In this sense they are symbols of a sort, too, but their metaphorical values are so specific that the broadness and depth of their meanings can be very limited in an allegorical poem or story, and there's a reluctance on the part of many readers to say that an allegorical figure is in the same category with a symbol as rich and profound as the cross. In any case, Dante's purpose in using metaphors of journey and dark forests is to make us actually have that familiar feeling of having lost our way. Metaphors always convey or evoke feelings - this is a simple but critical idea to discussions of mystical experience because, as we've seen, the mystical experience is ineffable, it cannot be directly described, and so the mystics indicate the only way to talk about their experiences and thoughts is to give approximations, locate images and figures which have qualities similar to those of the mystical experience. Since the mystical experience is an experience of unification, metaphors are more apt than similes because metaphors express identities, or unities, while similes silently stress the separateness of two things even in pointing out their similarities. If we follow Dante along his journey, we descend first into the anteroom of Hell, and then into Hell itself. Are we supposed to believe that Dante journeyed in his physical body down into "Hell" and then made his way up an actual mountain called Mount Purgatory, and so on into Paradise? The answer is no, of course not. So what do we understand his character to be doing? The answer is that the whole story is a metaphor - an allegory - for the journey of the soul. The world of the soul, the mystics from Plato on tell us, is like but not like the world of the body. It is as different from the physical world as the cave light is different from daylight. It is so different that no words have meanings that correspond to its reality. And so they speak of it in metaphors. There are spiritual beings, Dante is telling us, and as far as we can tell, he had some sort of actual contact or experience with them. Being unable to describe them, he tries in the Divine Comedy not to depict their actual forms or words - the spiritual beings have no forms or words - but to evoke or convey the feeling of what they were like. The spiritual beings in Hell are suffering horribly - this is the whole meaning of the first book of the Divine Comedy, known as "Hell" or the "Inferno." It happens that different kinds of weaknesses manifest themselves as different intensities and qualities of pain. Dante indicates that some weaknesses yield worse pain than others. Souls who simply could not control their sexual lust suffer pain that is like being blown eternally like leaves in the wind, it is a kind of hopelessness and helplessness that would be a terrible torture if experienced as unchangeable for all eternity. Dante represents this particular sort of pain as being located in the first circle of Hell. There are other forms of suffering. Souls unable to control their appetites for food and for wealth; souls unable to control their anger, and worse, unable to control their wish to do violence. Worse and worse suffering, through Malebolge, a series of ten ditches in which people unable to control their disposition to different kinds of fraud suffer as if - as if - their bodies were covered in filth or boiling pitch, or continually suffering horrible mutilations. At the bottom of Hell is the great being who perpetrated the worst fraud of all, Satan, a traitor to the creator of everything; Satan or Lucifer is a giant buried to the chest in ice, with the historical traitors Brutus, Cassius and Judas shoved into each of his three mouths. What's important to understand about this is that Dante does not mean he had a hallucination of Satan buried in ice, which he in turn interpreted as God's punishment of the rebellious archangel. Instead, Dante had a vision of the suffering of beings in the afterlife; he did not see with his eyes people undergoing unthinkable tortures, but he sensed or felt - at a level of reality not available to us down here watching the shadows dance on the far wall of our cave - what it is like to be those beings with those kinds of weaknesses. Dante, true to the pervasive Catholic milieu of the fourteenth century, speaks of these sufferings as "punishments" doled out by God. But the idea of "punishment" is itself a metaphor (which the church put to its own uses). "Punishment" in Dante refers to the state of a soul not in its proper relation to God. In our modern way of understanding, this is not properly "punishment" at all; we understand punishment to be a willful act of correction, whereas in |
most mystical senses those in Hell are responsible for their own sufferings. The "damned" are beings who are so far out of relation to the supreme being - or in a more secular sense we might say, "the cosmos" - that they have no hope of ever re-aligning themselves. "LASCIATE OGNI SPERANZA, VOI CH'ENTRATE" - "ABANDON EVERY HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE" - says the inscription over the gate to Dante's hell. To be clear, Catholicism is not the only religion with hell in its mythos. Buddhists speak of the Avici hell, an otherworldly location with beings suffering torments much like those in the "Inferno." Muslims speak of XXXXX. In Book 11 of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus performs a weird ritual and descends in spirit into Erebos, where the souls of the dead wander in unspecified, lonely unhappiness. In each of these depictions of suffering beings, it is normally a mistake to think of them as individual bodies being tortured. The image of physical bodies is used as a metaphor to represent a human reality which is not embodied, but is in a state of consciousness or being which is a state of suffering. In Dante, Mount Purgatory is depicted as a location of terrible suffering, too, but it differs greatly from Hell because the souls on the mountain willingly undergo their sufferings in order to right themselves and take their place in Paradise. Not to be repetitive, but in a mystical sense we should not understand that any dead spirits are literally being required to carry heavy stones or burn in fires. Dante's point is that there is an order of reality in which beings are purging their weaknesses - it is arduous and painful spiritual work. At the border between the top of Mount Purgatory and Paradise itself, is the Garden of Eden and then a wall of fire which protects the heavenly spheres from the disorder below. The metaphor for Paradise is the sky itself, the Moon, Sun and planets and stars. Again: Does Dante mean God and the angels literally live in the sky? No, he doesn't. He means the sky with its mind-bending distances and awe-inspiring beauty gives the feeling nearest to the feeling he experienced in his vision of the cosmos. After he works his way across the spheres, he reaches the ultimate center - and edge - of the universe, which is the creator himself, or herself, or itself, and the last stanzas of the Divine Comedy unfold dazzles of light and enormity that are meant to be blinding to the reading eye. This is Dante's attempt to convey the experience of union with God. … my sight, growing pure, penetrated ever deeper into the rays of the Light which is true in Itself. From then on my vision was greater Than our speech which fails at such a sight, Just as memory is overcome by the excess. As one who is a dream sees clearly, And the feeling impressed remains afterward, Although nothing else comes back to mind, So am I; for my vision disappears Almost wholly, and yet the sweetness Caused by it is still distilled within my heart. … O abundant grace through which I presumed To fix my eyes on the Eternal Light So long that I consumed my vision on it! We might read further and note that Dante essentially loses consciousness of himself in this light. "Light" is a perennial, widespread metaphor used in depictions of mystical experience, which we have already seen in Plato, and it becomes extraordinarily rich and complex as the figures of the Sun, its radiating light, and the Moon, stars and indeed all the light, or electromagnetic energy, that fills the universe unfolds as a figure of the actual unity of everything. Dante's vision is just our first example here of this use of the metaphor of light. Dante's Four Levels of Meaning So far we're speaking of metaphor in an allegorical sense, which could mislead us into thinking that an image used metaphorically has just one isolated corresponding value - as if the idea of a "journey" at the opening of the "Inferno" refers to that sense we have of moving through life, and nothing else. But metaphors are usually |
Reading Mystical Literature: Dante |