On Friday, May 11, I was the speaker at the monthly meeting of the New York C.S. Lewis Society. I talked about the Divine Comedy and Lewis' delightful homage to Dante, The Great Divorce.
Part of the talk was reading Dante in Iraq with young soldiers. I also read The Great Divorce and several other CSL books with a few of the Camp Adder chaplains.
The audio of my talk is too big to post on line. Let me know if you want it and I will share it. ngussman@yahoo.com
Here is the text of my talk, which is mostly an outline. If you listen to the talk you will see I leave the script about 10 minutes in:
Today I will be speaking about two books that give their
readers visions of the character and geography of the universe. I do this in a
month in which I just stepped over a major milestone on my own path to the
eternal world. I turned 65 last week.
C.S. Lewis died a week before his 65th birthday; I am already one
week past. We are all here because Lewis made such wonderful use of the talent
and time The Lord gave to him.
In the same way I fell in love from the first reading of Lewis,
the Divine Comedy became a literary obsession with me. And I did not know at
the time Lewis had written a lovely homage to the Divine Comedy that is the
other half of my talk tonight.
Before we start on our parallel journeys through eternity
with Dante and Lewis, I want to mention Machiavelli. Both Dante and Machiavelli were famous failed
Florentine politicians from either end of the glory days of the city-state of Florence. Dante in the late 1200s, Machiavelli in the
early 1500s. I first read the Prince in 1980;
I have re-read this slim book every four years since. Both Dante and Machiavelli admired the great
men of Florence and Rome. Dante’s Heaven is a roll call of the greats of
history. Machiavelli, looking at
greatness in a practical way, admires the men who wielded great power, but at
the same time, shows that earthly power is no path to virtue. So if the writer
of the Prince was assigning people to the afterlife, I think he would put most
of those he admired in Hell. In fact, I think the Prince is most concise manual
on how to go to Hell ever written. I read The Prince for ninth time in January
of 2016—as a warning, not as a guidebook.
I have loved and admired Dante’s poetry from my first
delighted reading and in its entirety: from the entrance of Hell to Celestial
Rose at the Center of Heaven, but his view of eternity seems to me much more
Roman than Christian. I could not articulate my aversion to Dante’s Heaven
immediately, but after I read The Great Divorce, I knew what was wrong. More later on the difference between Dante and
Lewis on Heaven.
So let’s start our journey.
Lewis was a great walker and a man who could read a map. He would use a map for his walking tours with
friends, and would certainly want a map for a journey to and through Hell and
up to and into Heaven.
Although the universe we see in The Great Divorce and The
Divine Comedy seem completely different, Lewis and Dante agree on matters of
scale.
With Dante and Virgil his guide, we circle down through Hell,
roughly 4,000 miles to Satan’s mid-section, then climb 4,000 miles back up to
the base of Mount Purgatory. According to the Antipodes Map, that is, of
course, antipodesmap.com, Mount Purgatory is roughly 2,000 miles east of New
Zealand in the Pacific Ocean, exactly where all the dirt would pile up when
Satan’s fall punched a hole from Jerusalem to the icy center of the Earth and
pushed all that dirt through to the other side of the world.
As an aside, I just want to say how different writing is in
this century than in the 20th century. I mean all kinds of writing from blog posts
to books. From the mid-80s to my recent retirement I wrote about chemistry and
electronics. In the previous century, I
was the owner of a quirky collection of dictionaries, encyclopedias and books
of tables that were my companions as I wrote about integrated circuit sockets
and the virtues of methane sulfonic acid—which are many, by the way. Now, every arcane fact that I want to know is
somewhere on the Internet. I was writing
this talk and decided I want to know where Mount Purgatory would be. I searched “point opposite on globe.” The
first link was to antipodesmap.com. I
know the Internet can be a sewer, but just like the sewers of Paris in Les Miserables, the sewer can stink and also
be a lifesaving place for a writer on deadline being chased by a screeching horde
of doubts.
While we are on the subject of research, let me mention
Lewis’, The Discarded Image.
If you have read the Divine Comedy, before you read it again,
read The Discarded Image. It
helped me to understand things that even the best notes in Divine Comedy
translations cannot explain. I will have
more to say about notes and translations at the end of my presentation.
Now to the maps. In the universe Dante shows us, Hell is a
4,000-mile deep ditch. In this universe
sin are heavy. Lewis wrote elsewhere about The Weight of Glory, but in Dante,
sin has weight Glory is lighter and lighter. So it follows that Satan, as the
most proud creature in the universe, would be the heaviest. In Dante’s universe, the earth is at the
center in the way a drain is at the center of a sink. It is the place where everything falls. So Satan, heavy with sin, falls from the
unfathomably great height of the Presence of God toward the earth, which is the
lowest point from every direction. Also, earth is the planet on which sin is
quarantined. Satan, in this view, was
directly above Jerusalem in the greatest celestial sphere when he fell from
Heaven. The greatest sinner—the longest,
deepest fall.
Full of sin, Satan hits so hard he punches a hole all the way
to the center of the earth. The dirt he
shoves out of the way pushes out the other side east of New Zealand and forms
Mount Purgatory. From the top of Mount
Purgatory, repentant sinners step off into Heaven, which extends to an immeasurable
distance in every direction.
The repentant sinners can make that final step from this
world to the next because unburdened souls lose the weight of sin. The lightened souls rise toward the light of Heaven.
Let’s now turn to The Great Divorce. Lewis shows us a
world that seems at first reading very different. To those inside Hell, the place is infinite
in every direction. Hell is flat, gray,
rainy and limitless.
Napoleon is a million miles from the center of Hell striding
back and forth blaming everyone else for his defeat.
Older sinners are unimaginably far beyond the Emperor of
France. When the tour bus leaves Hell it flies ever upward along a vast cliff
toward the edge of Heaven.
It would seem the Hell of Lewis is far larger and far deeper
than the 4,000-mile deep ditch of Inferno.
But near the end of Lewis’ book, we find out at the end of Lewis’ tale
that Hell is the reverse of what we first believed. The place of separation
from God rather than being infinitely large is infinitesimally small, fitting in
a tiny crack in the ground between blades of Heavenly grass.
When we find the true size of Hell, it is more like Dante’s
vision in scale. Although Hell under the earth is the radius of our planet, on
the scale of all of creation, Hell is vanishingly small. So in the end, we find
the maps of Dante and Lewis are relatively the same, Hell is of insignificant
size relative to the vastness of creation and Heaven.
Of course, none of us know what we will see in life after
death. I am sure that just in this room there are many competing beliefs about
the details of eternal life, and if we asked the next dozen passers by outside
these doors, we would get a dozen more.
I would not claim a coherent view of eternity, but the view I
have of eternity comes from C.S. Lewis much more than Dante Alighieri. Most
chillingly, I first understood from Lewis that the doors of Hell are locked
from the inside:
“I willingly believe that the damned are, in one
sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the gates of hell are locked on the
inside.” (The Problem of Pain, 127)
And in The Great Divorce the
character of George MacDonald observes:
“There are only two kinds of people in the end:
those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end,
‘Thy will be done.’”
More vividly, every sinner but one who boards the
bus and travels to Heaven opts to return to their smoky, rainy eternal home.
The choice comes down to admitting sin, asking forgiveness or damnation. Pride and Envy lead the ruined souls to
reject life in Heaven if the price is admission of sin.
When I first believed, one of the changes I noticed
was that words seemed stronger, more significant than before. When I lived in the vague universe of a
Jewish agnostic, words seemed less concrete, less important. After coming to believe in a universe full of
the Glory of God, when I heard someone say, “I’ll never forgive him, ever” I
wanted to run up and say “NO! Don’t say that!”
I actually tried that with a family member. The results were not encouraging.
Lewis shows us vividly and painfully that we can
cling to our superiority, our sense of injury, our vanity, and our hatred.
Until recently, even the most proud among us was
reluctant to say in public, “I have no need for forgiveness.” Although that was
jarring in a public figure, Lewis makes clear that the man who says, “I’m as
good as everyone else” is really saying the same thing. As Lewis said elsewhere the first mark of a
bad man is to say, “I am good.”
If the scale of the universe in the books of Dante
and Lewis, their treatment of sin is very different.
In Dante, some sinners defy Heaven and, I believe,
would grab at a chance of forgiveness if offered. Those sinners are in the
upper circles of Hell where the sins of the flesh are punished. The sins of the
flesh are those in which our bodies are instruments.
Lower in Hell, spiritual sins such as Pride, Envy and
the various flavors of fraud, are punished. These are the since we share with
fallen angels. Many of these sinners defy Heaven.
Lewis and Dante diverge sharply here. In Lewis free
will pervades the universe. Every
denizen of Hell could potentially repent, even though the actual number of
those repenting in The Great Divorce is just one.
In Dante, those sent to Hell stay in Hell. This is nowhere more sadly vivid than in the
case of Virgil. Dante’s guide, the man
appointed by Beatrice to lead Dante all the way through Hell and up Mount
Purgatory, is condemned to Hell forever.
Virgil is with good company in the Limbo, which is the Upper West Side
of Hell, but he endures separation from God forever nonetheless.
For 25 years from my first reading of The Divine
Comedy I took the justice of Virgil’s place in Hell for granted. Dante’s
universe reflects both the theology and science of his time. But not everyone is willing to accept Dante’s
judgment of Virgil’s place in eternity.
In 2009, I deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq, an Army airbase near the Kuwait
border. For the first few months, I was
a mechanic and did not leave the base, so I started a book club, a Dead Poets
Society. It was July. The temperature topped out at 133, 16 days of the month,
so what better book than Inferno. I had
a group of a dozen young soldiers who wanted to read a classic book. We got through Inferno by September. I
previewed Purgatorio and mentioned Virgil gets sent back to Limbo. As a group
they were outraged. It was not fair. The
result was we read Aeneid next and then read Purgatorio. They wanted more of Virgil and thought Dante was
not much of a Battle Buddy.
In this matter of eternal punishment, we also see how
differently Lewis viewed the universe that the great poet of Florence. If I were going to write a 21st
Century Inferno, I would stuff Hitler and Stalin into maw of Satan with Judas.
Televangelists would fill the 8th Circle so full
with fraud that they would overflow into other Malebolge.
The architects of the Iraq War who said we would be greeted
as conquerors would be condemned to kick open a door and get a different limb
blown off every day for eternity. In
other words, I want my enemies in Dante’s Hell.
For myself and those I love, I want Lewis’ eternity. Condemned by our own choices certainly, but
able to reconsider.
And now let’s look at some of the details of Dante’s world.
Returning to the The Discarded Image Lewis said,
“There was nothing which medieval people liked better, or did better, than
sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they
would most have admired the card index.”
Dante sorts sins minutely into nine circles, but that’s after
passing through the vestibule of Hell where the indifferent are punished. Although we are not yet in Hell, the
punishment is terrible. The sinners, angels and humans, who took neither side
chase banners and are chased by insects forever.
The first six circles each punish a single sin, the seventh circle
is subdivided three rings, and the eighth circle into ten ditches, and then the
region of giants separates the eighth and ninth circles.
One’s place in Hell is assigned by Charon. Canto III
Here are the circles:
1.
Limbo—no
punishment or the greatest punishment
2.
Lust—Mute
Paolo, wistful Francesca
3.
Gluttony
4.
Avaricious
and Prodigal—the cheap and the spendthrifts clash forever.
5.
Wrathful
6.
Heretics
a.
Dante and Virgil meet Farinata degli Uberti in the Sixth Circle
of Hell, a place reserved for heretics. The bleak landscape is filled with
cemeteries, and the dead are buried there again in tombs and sarcophagi to
indicate that they are dead even to the afterlife. Dante carries on a
relatively long conversation with Farinata in a scene that likely had more
drama for contemporary readers than modern ones.
b.
Outside of Dante’s narrative, the real Farinata led one of two
opposing factions struggling for power. When Farinata’s Ghibellines were in
power, he stopped the potential destruction of Florence. The tide turned with
the Battle of Montaperti in 1260, which saw Florence burned to the ground and
the Uberti family exiled. Their property was completely destroyed, and
Farinata—along with his wife—was put on trial for heresy. Found guilty, he was
exhumed and his remains were scattered on unconsecrated
ground.
7.
Violent
against
a.
Neighbor
b.
Self
c.
God
8.
Fraud
a.
Panderers
and Seducers
b.
Flatterers—Machiavelli
says they flock around every leader, certainly my experience in and out of the
Army
c.
Simonists—buying
of Church offices from Simon who tried to buy Holy power from Peter
d.
Soothsayers
e.
Grafters—abuse
of political office
f.
Hypocrites
g.
Thieves
h.
False
Counselors
i.
Sowers
of Discord—Talk Radio
j.
Counterfeiters/Falsifiers
9.
Traitors
Dante carefully parses the sins and condemns each sinner for
what used to be called his or her besetting sin.
In The Great Divorce, on the other hand, everyone at the bus
stop and everyone on the bus is guilty of a different sin, but the sinners are
all guilty of Pride, the sin of Satan, the sin that locks the doors of Hell
from the inside. We come to know this as they refuse mercy in the encounters at
the edge of Heaven. As Lewis said in
Mere Christianity:
“The vice I
am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in
Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the
essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed,
drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through
Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is
the complete anti-God state of mind.”
Lewis, to me, has it right. A few years ago I tried to write
my own inferno full of millionaire preachers.
The problem was trying to put them in one circle. And over my life, my own sins are suited to
occasion and circumstance, but always backed up with Pride and Vanity. Even a
400-pound televangelist could not be properly confined to greed or gluttony.
So the bus in the Great Divorce condenses all of Hell into
one shining vehicle and transports the sinners to both Heaven and possibly
Purgatory.
Since we are mentioning the bus, it is time to mention the
Driver and his parallel in the Divine Comedy, the Angel in Canto 9.
Last month, one of my former co-workers who is an avid reader
of Lewis was talking about Lewis’ self description in De Descriptionem Temporem that he, Lewis, is one of the last
medieval men, a dinosaur they can study.
And yet, when Lewis rewrites Dante’s universe, the result is very
modern. The universe is guided by the
Universalism of George McDonald, not Hellfire.
In the Discarded Image Lewis tells us with admiration that the universe
of medieval theology, which Dante brought to life, is ordered and vertical. We
look up into a night sky full of warmth and music and love. The modern universe is horizontal, flat, cold
and forbidding. Lewis’ Hell is flat, rainy, gray and infinite with occasional
spots of light like in Napoleon’s mansion—not unlike the cold, empty universe
of modern cosmology, vast spaces at 3 degrees above absolute zero dotted with
stars, but stars without spirit, music or life, fusion furnaces amid the
emptiness. Lewis’ Heaven also goes against all traditional Churches, which
manage to find a way to honor great achievement in earthly pursuits. Sarah Smith is wonderful, but the visible
Church in this world creates Cardinals and Bishops and venerates leaders. Sarah
simply lived love.
She is the most venerated being in CSL’s Heaven.
Of course, one could say Lewis wrote for modern people in a
modern idiom to express eternal principles, which is also true. But the brilliant mind that created the flat
Hell and the scales of time and space from infinite to infinitesimal, was a
mind thoroughly steeped in the modern world.
Translations
Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot and many other great lovers of
Dante learned medieval Italian to better know the Divine Comedy. At one point, I thought of learning the
language of Dante and Machiavelli, but I well know from 30+ years of struggle
with Ancient Greek that reading a language and not speaking it is quite beyond
my limited abilities. I read French
partly because I traveled to France many times and had the chance to struggle
with the language of the Ancien Regime.
So for the rest of us, translation is the only possibility.
Every translation is a compromise and the richer the poetry
the more compromises must be made. Yet in Dante, Lewis says Dante is the most translatable of poets.
So I have read eight translations and found them all with
significant merits. Such ranking as I
have is much more personal taste than real merit. By contrast, I have read widely in 19th
Century Russian literature. With Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, I have a strong
preference for the translations of Pevear and Volokhonsky. With most literature
in translation, the translator can make an enormous difference.
In general, following Lewis’ admonitions in Studies in Words about
the way words change, I prefer recent translation to an older one. A
200-year-old translation is full of syntax, idiom and meaning of its own
time.
The first translation I read, and my favorite for the entire
commedia is Mark Musa’s translation published between 1967 and 2002.
The Inferno I love best is Pinsky.
For Purgatorio, my favorite is W.S. Merwin.
My favorite Paradiso is Tony Esolen’s translation, partially
by virtue of the notes. He is particularly good in Paradiso. Esolen was my choice for the soldiers in Iraq
who never read the Divine Comedy.
The most fun notes of all I have read are in Dorothy Sayers’s
translation. But I don’t like the translation itself. As with Ciardi, I sadly
cannot read hard rhymes in English for page after page with pleasure.
The new Clive James translation uses soft rhymes as with
Pinsky. I enjoyed that very much. His translation is looser than the rest,
going for meaning in preference to adherence to strict line length. He adds
lines in places for clarity.
Last year I read Stanley Lombardo’s translation and finally
read the Italian aloud, just for the sound.
I listened to Roberto Benigni read on YouTube, then read the Italian
myself.
Lewis on Commedia
“Much of the strength of
[Dante’s] Comedy comes from the fact that it is
performing a complex function that has since been split up and distributed
among several different kinds of book. It is, first, a book of travel into
regions which the audience could not reach but in whose existence they had a
literal belief, and is thus strictly comparable to Jules Verne’s or H.G.
Wells’s voyages to the Moon. It is, secondly, a poetic expression of the
current philosophy of the age…thirdly, a religious allegory like
Bunyan[‘s Pilgrim’s
Progress],
and fourthly a history of the poet like [Wordsworth’s] The Prelude – not to mention its political
and historical aspects which would set it side by side with the memoirs of a
retired statesman. In this complexity of function it dos not, of course, stand
alone. All old works of art show the same contrast to modern works, and the
history of all arts tells the same miserable story of progressive
specialization and impoverishment. Thus Tasso is, in some sense, the Milton and
Wordsworth of his age – the great serious poet; but he is mediating all his
serious poetry through pastoral and chivalrous stories of the kind then
generally enjoyed and so writing epic poetry and popular fiction at the same
time…In the same way, the great Italian painters are not only the Cézannes and
Picassos of their day; they are also the popular illustrators whose work would
now appear in Christmas magazines, the people who show you what some famous
story really looked like; and, thirdly, they are the great decorators who can
make a rich man’s dining room look as he wants it to look. So, once more, an
opera by Mozart is the ancestor both of the modern serious opera and of the
revue. The separation of the low-brow from the high-brow in its present
sharpness is a comparatively recent thing: and with the loss of the old unified
function all curb on the eccentricity of real artists and the vulgarity of mere
entertainers has vanished.”
–from Studies
in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UP, 1966): 67-68.
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