The Sapiental Mysticism of Dante, Part 1
A lecture to high school students by GUIDO DE GIORGIO
Today we begin a three part translation of a lecture given by Guido De Giorgio, introducing Dante’s Divine Comedy to his Italian high school students. It serves not only as an outline of Dante’s masterpiece (and De Giorgio’s orientations regarding it), but also as an indication of the much higher level of education at that time.
One cannot and should not consider Dante as a 'poet' in the ordinary and modern sense of the word. For moderns, poetry is “an expression of individual states”; it is subjective, it is limited, it is purely aesthetic.
Modern aesthetics, from De Sanctis onwards, tries to detach poetry from any content, from any adherence to philosophy, morality, or anything else. To understand Dante, one must refer back to the definition that Boccaccio gives of poets: according to Boccaccio, they walk in the footsteps, that is, in the traces of the Holy Spirit: they are therefore poets if inspired by the Spirit of God.
THE SWEET NEW STYLE
The school to which Dante belongs, the “dolce stil novo” (sweet new style), is distinguished by its inspiration, but this inspiration is not individual and static; it is sacred.
Recent studies, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Guénon, to Valli, have demonstrated that the poets of the Sweet New Style did not deal with “love” in the ordinary, human sense of the word, but according to a sacred, divine inspiration, attributing to their women the attributes of Divine Wisdom. Thus is the meaning of the first verse of Dante's love song: “Donna che avete intelletto d’amore” (Ladies who have intellect of love)." This very lofty concept is echoed in the Paradiso with "Intellectual light, full of love."
Intellect of love is Wisdom, divine wisdom. Here, the purely religious viewpoint is surpassed, because while religion is a vague and general adherence to the divine, without deep commitments, without absolute dedication, without science and inquiry into the mysteries of God, Mysticism is a penetration into Divine Life, it is integrated, vibrant, lived Religion, it is a living experience of God.
In this sense, Dante is a mystic; he lives, knows, and operates within the divine sphere.
He is, therefore, a poet of God.
St. Paul would say that he belongs to the small contingent of operatores Dei, that is, those who actively participate in divine truth, living it; who eat, who drink the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
THE DIVINE COMEDY AS A SACRED POEM
Dante himself gives his “comedy” the designation of “sacred poem”, adding "to which both heaven and earth have contributed their hand". This is a very clear allusion to the value of Dante's cosmology. While modern science, completely detached from God, seeks explanations and laws of phenomena in purely material terms, ancient science always considered the world in reference to the divine plane, because the world is, in Christian terms, a place of passage, of transit, of trial from earth to Heaven.
Earth and Heaven, therefore, are the two fixed hinges of the world around which the planetary vortex unfolds. This vortex is a movement of love, a thirst, a desire for God. As we can see, we are far from the simplistic materialism of modern science, which starts from matter and remains in matter, while ancient science starts from God and returns to God. The earth is like a springboard for the man who must return to God, which is why it must be immobile, just like the Empyrean which is the heaven of heavens, or as Scripture says,
COELUM COELI.
The earth-heaven bipolarity is resolved in the unity of Man-God, in the mystery of the Word made Flesh so that the flesh becomes Word, as St. Augustine says: “God became man so that man might become God...” This leads us to the greatest and noblest reality of deification, that is, the conquest, as Guénon would say, of the higher states of being, to reach the Being of Being, that is, God.
And now one understands the value of the expression “sacred poem”,
The terms “poetry”, “poem” come from the Greek verb poieo which means to make, create, realize, so “sacred poem” means the realization of the sacred, the divine.
It is not, therefore, merely a religious attitude; it is much more, it is operation, realization, sanctification.
WHAT IS THE COMEDY?
The Comedy is the fixation of a mystical and real journey, mystical because it was accomplished in the sphere of the supernatural, in the other world, real because Dante visited what he described, what he spoke of. That the journey was real is proven by the accuracy of the itinerary and especially by the continuous matches with other traditions. Naturally, there are no material proofs for these things, so those who do not want to believe, let them not believe, but those who know, those who have experienced these mystical experiences, those who dedicate their lives to it, do not doubt the reality of what Dante saw, lived, and thus poetically fixed. Fantasies belong to the modern world. The ancients dealt with real, living, true things, and nothing is more real than the divine world which is, in fact, the only reality because it neither rises nor sets, while the world rises and sets with man... The medievals knew these things that moderns ignore; they were deeper, more vigilant, more learned about divine matters, thus more fundamentally religious, Christian, Catholic.
WHY COMEDY?
Because it has a sad beginning, the earth, and a happy ending: heaven. Because it starts from man and goes to God. Because from an illusion, the world, it goes to a reality: God.
Because it begins with darkness, Hell, and ends with and in Light, Paradise.
Because it is the depiction of all of life, which, for the common man, is a tragedy (damnation), for the Christian it is a comedy (salvation, liberation). Because it shows us creation as a theater, an illusion that aims to bring man back to God, to save him, to redeem him, to unite him with God.
WHAT IS THE COMEDY FOR CHRISTIANS?
It is an inexhaustible mine of truths, a teaching, a guide, an illumination that integrates, develops, and explains the obscurity of Holy Scripture, lives it, realizes it, showing its deepest meaning, the anagogical one (this term from Greek has a general sense of “to lift up”, from low to high, to instruct, to teach, to venture into deep waters) in which the literal, moral, and allegorical sense supersensibly culminate. The Comedy does not just give us religion: it gives us the essence of religion, its deepest part, its mystical, interior reality.
THEOLOGY OR HOLY WISDOM?
Theology is the science of reason applied to truths of faith. Holy wisdom is Love that rises to God. Now love is deeper than reason because reason walks, love has wings, it flies. Sacred science is precisely the science of Divine Love. Here, in Dante, love is understood as loving intellect, not something passionate, disordered, or individual. Love = a-mors, immortality, infinite thirst for God.
On earth, thirst is quenched, in heaven never. Earthly love is exhaustible, divine love is not: it is love of love. The Comedy is the poem of love... Dante, the pilgrim of love, and all saints, all masters, are pilgrims of love.
DIFFICULTY OF THE COMEDY
The Comedy is extremely difficult because it deals with supernatural things. One will never fully exhaust it or clarify it because the oral Tradition is missing. Oral tradition is much more extensive, profound, than the written one because it is secret, personal, addressing only a few, the "little flock" of the Gospel... For the complete understanding of Dante, there are missing pieces that will always be missing, unfortunately!
PLACES AND CHARACTERS OF THE COMEDY
The places and characters of the Comedy are mystical, mystical experiences, not historical fixations or real places. Starting from the great truth that there are countless ways to go to God, every Dantean figure is an experience of rejection (Hell) or acceptance of God (Purgatory-Paradise). God is one, but one can access Him from every direction, by denying Him, exalting Him, in all ways, in bad, in good, in everything, since He is everything... Good, evil, light-darkness, noble-vile... everything tends towards God, aspiring to Him, distancing from Him, blessing Him, cursing Him, loving Him, hating Him, because God is all in all, one in all, the center of a circumference with infinite rays that converge in Him.
Therefore, from Hell to Paradise, it is always Him, only Him, through various experiences of distancing or approaching, from those "without infamy and without praise" to the seraphim whose love breathes fervent and eternal around the Almighty. He alone, God, is beyond opposites, beyond darkness and light, beyond evil and good, because in Him, the absolute truth, all opposition dissolves, all discord is annulled, all divergence is calmed. But to make the reader understand the vastness of mystical experiences, as Dante himself states at the end of Canto XVII of Paradise, he has resorted to known places, known characters that attract the reader and make accessible the various aspects, attitudes of the creature towards the Creator.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE COMEDY
It is enormous, an immense cathedral with a thousand spires, each of which is in itself a world. It contains the entire universe, all of creation, made into a temple of God, not studied scientifically, no, but symbolically, as a mirror, a resonance of God's power that reflects in wisdom and emanates in Love, Father, Son, Spirit... The three worlds: Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, correspond to the tripartition: body, soul, spirit; in the scale of elements: earth, air, fire, ether.
Water touches the earth and lies between Hell and Purgatory, while Ether (or quintessence) is the ethereal substance of the heavens. From Earth to Purgatory, water; from Purgatory to Paradise, fire.
Water cleanses, fire sublimates... In this temple that is the Comedy, there are countless, subtle correspondences, connections, symbolism, relationships: all in terms of a sacred science that has nothing to do with profane, secular, irreligious science, which, by studying the world, creation, denies and negates God, the Creator…
Dante, like all medievals, did not seek the useful (the modern scientific viewpoint) but the true, and the true is only in God who is pure spirit, not matter. From what is pure spirit, from God, nothing else can come but spirit... thoroughly understanding this point, one perceives the vanity, the emptiness of matter which is, and can only be, an illusion. Hence the fragility, the error of science that builds in the void, without God. To speak of utility, benefits, progress, is like building within the walls of a dream, because the world, life, beings, everything is a dream, a Comedy, in the face of God who alone is what He is... But to reach this terrible certainty, that God alone is, one must break through, pass through all of creation, live it, penetrate it from darkness to light, from Hell to Paradise, from Evil to Good, step by step; in other words, return creation to God, give it back to Him so that He alone may be.
The "pilgrim of Love" must uncover the divine deception, creation, and say to God, "You have hidden yourself so that I might discover You... By returning everything You've given me, I reject the gift and take the Giver, YOU...". This we say is in strict evangelical application, which Dante fixes with "The Kingdom of Heaven suffers violence"; but he adds "from fervent Love", an apparent victory of man over God, who wins while being defeated, because He allows Himself to be defeated in order to seize His attacker and incorporate him into Love... This is the secret of conquering God.
THE COMEDY AS THE POEM OF THE CONQUEST OF GOD
The Gospel says: regnum coelorum vim patitur, meaning the kingdom of heaven, God, suffers violence and admits conquest, but not, Dante adds, in a human, material way, but by the force of love, of "fervent love" that scales the heavens.
A mystic of Islam speaks of an “assault against God” but it's easy to understand that this “against God” is with God and for God, who allows Himself to be conquered to conquer... After the conquest, only one remains: the One, God. The Comedy is the poetic account of this conquest, which Dante Christianly fixes on the life and death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, so that the mystical journey is completed during the strictly Easter period.
At noon on Holy Saturday, when the Church celebrates the vigil of Christ's Resurrection, Dante, renewed and purified by the waters of Lethe and Eunoë, ascends with Beatrice "to the stars", that is, to Paradise.
The conquest of God is thus accomplished with Jesus Christ, whose Passion, Death, and Resurrection Dante repeats.
From the "savage forest" to the "thick and living forest" and from there, sky by sky to the Empyrean, it is all the Christic experience, step by step, willed, lived, to return to the Father in the totality of the Man-God cycle, because the importance of the Comedy, from a Christian perspective, far exceeds the literary-aesthetic values that Dantean exegesis attributes to it.
Dante is a poet because he is a "pilgrim of Love" and aesthetic perfection in him serves the depth of mysticism. All the mystical complexity of Christianity is infused into the Comedy in lucid poetry, but sacred, universal poetry, that sings of the love that has only light as its boundary.
LEAH AND RACHEL: ACTION AND CONTEMPLATION
Dante's realization hinges on the symbolism of Leah and Rachel, representing active life and contemplative life, which correspond to temporal power and spiritual authority; the emperor-monarch and the Pope.
Action is governed by the four cardinal virtues, contemplation by the three theological virtues, the full exercise of which leads to the Earthly Paradise and the Celestial Paradise.
With the four cardinal virtues, man reconquers his primacy on earth, Adam; with the three theological virtues, his divine sonship, Christ.
Edenic perfection is overtaken, surpassed by Christic perfection, and the very original sin, the macula originalis, is called in the Holy Saturday preface felix culpa [happy fault] because the state of divine fullness that Christ achieves through his death, passion, and resurrection far exceeds the gifts the Lord gave to Adam by placing him in Eden: the Earthly Paradise, being the first a state of creation, the second a state of conquest. Let us not forget that our Lord Jesus Christ voluntarily suffered, voluntarily died, voluntarily rose, and Dante, indeed, voluntarily follows and repeats the Christic experience, dying to earthly, fallible life, and living in the heavenly, eternal life.
MYSTICAL DEATH
It is the supreme, voluntary offering of oneself to God. It is more death than death, because it is conscious, integral, willed. Physical death is passively endured, inevitably, while mystical death is prepared for, desired, actively and voluntarily sought: and it is an integral death because everything dies in the mystic who offers himself to God, both soul and body, not just the body.
Here, we understand by soul not the spirit, but the individual, particular, limited soul, not the deep soul, that of God, which most men ignore, do not know they possess, so conquered are they by the fallacy of the small soul that roars, struggles, and thus sins, since whatever is not done in the name of God is truly sin.
Mystical death is the triumph of God over man, it is the cross voluntarily assumed, the blood voluntarily shed, the flesh voluntarily crucified so that only the spirit lives, the spirit of God... Human pain becomes the footstool of divine joy, the cross of blood becomes a cross of glory, the patient [suffering] Christ becomes the triumphant Christ. “And night will shine like day”, the night (of death, of pain, of passion) will blaze like a full day, eternally solar, eternally luminous. In mystical death, man treads on Adam's skull, stands atop the cross, shedding the paradisiacal glories of divine union, returning to God all of himself, all the world, all creation in Christ, through Christ, with Christ so that the Lord may be and may be forever the Lord of the Heavens. This is the deep meaning of the crucifixion, the cupio dissolvi, the desire to die completely, so that God alone may be, God in power, God in wisdom, God in love, God of God in God...
With the "consummatum est," Jesus Christ has consecrated the world to God, has dissolved the deceit of the world in the reality of God, has fulfilled His mission of deification, has made everything divine, all Spirit, Spirit of God.