A PICTURE OF HUMAN SOCIETY

During the past couple of months I have been studying Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is composed of three books: Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradisio in Italian and Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in English. Dorothy Sayers has been my guide in the Penguin Classics series. She explains that the Comedy can be interpreted at four levels:  (1) the literal story as a fictional journey of the state of souls after death, with a cast of characters from Dante’s historical era; and then three levels of allegorical interpretation: (2) the political sense or the Way of the City dealing with the life of man in this world with the Inferno showing us the picture of a corrupt society, the Purgatorio as showing society engaged in purging off that corruption and returning to the ideal constitution which was God’s intention for it and the Paradisio showing the ideal constitution in working order; (3) the Way of the Soul: dying to sin with Christ so that it may find the freedom to become one with Christ; and (4) the mystical or Way of Contemplation. Sayers describes the political sense as an allegory of the City which seems very relevant to today.

“That the Inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, everybody will readily agree. And since we are today fairly well convinced that society is in a bad way and not necessarily evolving in the direction of perfectibility, we find it easy enough to recognize the various stages by which the deep of corruption is reached. Futility; lack of a living faith; the drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, and uncontrolled bad temper; a self-opinionated and obstinate individualism; violence, sterility, and lack of reverence for life and property including one’s own; the exploitation of sex, the debasing of language by advertisement and propaganda, the commercializing of religion, the pandering to superstition and the conditioning of people’s minds by mass-hysteria and ‘spell-binding’ of all kinds, venality and string-pulling in public affairs, hypocrisy, dishonesty in material things, intellectual dishonesty, the fomenting of discord (class against class, nation against nation) for what one can get out of it, the falsification and destruction of all the means of communication; the exploitation of the lowest and stupidest mass-emotions; treachery even to the fundamentals of kinship, country, the chosen friend, and the sworn allegiance: these are the all-too-recognizable stages that lead to the cold death of society and the extinguishing of all civilized relations.

Nor need we spend much time over the process of reintegration which, for society as well as for man, means a recognition of error, repentance, and the purging off of evil states of mind. We might note two points. First, that for Dante the restoration of society must come from within and not from without: the change of heart must precede the establishment of right institutions. Secondly, Virgil’s account of the capital sins is worth some consideration. The evil loves that have to be purged are (a) the pride that seeks domination and cannot bear to see any other person, class or nation enjoying equal or superior privileges; (b) the envy that is terrified of any sort of competition, lest another’s gain should be one’s own loss; (c) the anger that exacts vindictive reparations and cannot forgive past injuries. Then there is sloth, which may take the forms either of indifference, delay or despair. Then come the disordered loves for things right in themselves but wrong when they are made an end in themselves: (a) avarice, which is the love of money, whether in the sense of grudging thrift or conspicuous waste, and the lust for that power which money gives; (b) the greed of a high standard of living; and (c) the lussuria (lust)which is the exaltation of emotional and personal relationships above all other loyalties, human or divine.”

(Dorothy Sayers, Introductory Papers on Dante, Vol. 1, The Poet Alive in His Writings, 114,115)