Paolo and Francesca

I'm posting here a fairly lengthy section of Charles Williams book on Dante, The Figure of Beatrice. It is an extremely perceptive account of how the soul first begins the downward steps to sin, based on the first circles of hell from Dante's Inferno.

The Year of Mercy called by the Pope which began on 8th Dec 2015 has the admirable aim of bringing more of us back into the loving embrace of God's forgiveness. There has been much talk of 'journeying' with the sinner, of pastoral outreach, and penitential pathways. I think we are also invited this year to take a clear look at the circumstances of sin, for it is sin that ultimately can put the supreme obstacle between us and God's mercy. If this were not the case there would be no need for Christ's salvific action, for the Sacraments, or the Church.

Here we are introduced to the first choice that the soul makes in hell, which is a choice of the imagination. We are invited to see how gradual and excusable the path to sin seems, how innocently and blamelessly we might be tempted to see ourselves as we start on a path that will lead to our damnation. How important it is to be awake in the spirit, understanding that we are constantly making choices between good and evil, even just in small lazinesses and through the thoughts and desires that we entertain, and those we reject. A solid education in the human condition, in how flawed and wretched we are or can be, is not something the Church should flinch from, knowing how little the modern world likes to hear such things. It is the supremely merciful thing to do to confront the soul with the reality of its choices, and where those choices will lead.

If anyone is qualified to talk about the way Dante describes the dalliance of the soul with 'lussuria' or indulgence, sexual infidelity etc, it is Charles Williams. By all accounts an odd, charismatic man, he was a fine theologian, and his understanding of Dante impressed many, including Dorothy Sayers, who translated and annotated the Inferno. But his personal life was highly unusual to say the least, and whilst married, he carried on many romantic liaisons with women. I won't go into that here, but I believe the passage I have reproduced is evidence of the way in which:

Williams, as his interest in Dante grew and as he began to publish on the great poet, began to present him as he had “very seldom” been understood before: “as a poet among poets, creating . . . ‘an accurate image of actual experience.’” (from this excellent blog post)

From the Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams:

"they come to the circle where the lecherous are tossed on a storm. This is the place of what is probably the most famous episode in the whole Commedia, the episode of Paolo and Francesca - which is always quoted as an example of Dante's tenderness. So, no doubt, it is, but it is not here for that reason, nor even for the more important reason of poetically lightening the monotonous gloom of hell. It has a much more important place; it presents the first tender, passionate, and half-excusable consent of the soul to sin.

Up to this point (Inf. V) the Imagination has been in suspense; it has not chosen- whether from a shameful shrinking from choice into a spiritual cosiness, or from its not being confronted with this religious choice. It is now shown as choosing, and the choice is made as plausible as it possibly can be, Francesca's description of how she and Paolo read together, how in that reading their eyes sometimes met and their colour changed, how they came to the moment when Lancelot kissed Guinevere; how

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi bacio tutto tremante-

'he who shall never be divided from me kissed my mouth all trembling; the book was a pander, and he who wrote it; that day we read no more': Francesca's description of Love itself, with a certain reminiscence of Dante's own poem, 'Love and the gentle heart', for she says : 'Love, which quickly knows itself in the gentle heart....Love which excuses no loved one from loving....Love does not yet abandon me'- all this heightens comprehension until Dante himself sighs to think 'how many sweet thoughts, how great a desire, brought them to this dolorous state'. 

What indeed was the sin? It was a forbidden love? yes, but Dante (in the place he gives it in the Commedia) does not leave it at that. He so manages the very description, he so heightens the excuse, that the excuse reveals itself precisely as the sin. [italics mine]. The old name for lechery was luxuria; lussuria is the word Virgil uses of this circle, and it is lussuria, luxury, indulgence, self-yielding, which is the sin, and the opening out of hell. The persistent parleying with the occasion of sin, the sweet prolonged laziness of love, is the first surrender of the soul to hell - small but certain. The formal sin here is the adultery of the two lovers; the poetic sin is their shrinking from the adult love demanded of them, and their refusal of the opportunity of glory. Hell, in Dante, is in the shape of a funnel, and a funnel is exactly what hell is; and this moment of the lovers' yielding is the imagination swept around the inner edge of the funnel. Here all is still good except the very good itself; all is still valuable except value itself; 'il ben dell' intelletto' quivers and a little disintegrates. 

The adultery here is only the outer mark; the sin is a sin possible to all lovers, married or unmarried, adulterous or marital. It is a sin especially dangerous to Romantics, so much so that its essence has often been taken to be a mark of Romanticism. But this, if we allow Dante and Wordsworth to be true Romantics, it hardly is; it is much more the sign of the pseudo-Romantic- in life even more than in letters. At the Francescan moment the delay and the deceit have only begun; therefore their punishment- say their choice- has in it all the good they chose as well as all the evil. Their love is as changeless as the storm. A consolation lingers with them through the infinite 'forever'. So in the poem; and could the soft delaying indulgence of the soul so delay perpetually, the imagination and the will might also be content to lose heaven for that.

It cannot; it has entered hell. It has, as the two poets, following their own way of discovery, so well see, to lose gradually what good was still left to it. In the Francescan moment each of the lovers had delight in the image of the other, and both of them had a mutual delight in their love. Their mutual lussuria indulged this. But lussuria cannot in fast stop there; the mutual indulgence is bound too soon to become two separate single indulgences. It is true that lussuria is to be distinguished from the sollagia of the Convivio. Sollagia, with all the rest of Pleasantness, is a moral duty - to oneself as to the other; eros itself is in that sense not only permissible but must be enjoined. It is part of our 'honourable estate' - of nobility - to amuse and be amused; the Convivio is in that sense a commentary on the words used in the marriage rite according to the use of the Church of England. But when the sollagia dominate, they become lussuria; they set up in the human organism a hunger for them which , from being mutual, becomes single. An appetite for the use of this Image prevails; this is Gluttony and this is the next circle of hell (VI).

 The souls lie there under a foul and heavy rain, and below the claws of an Organism of hell, Cerberus, who deafeningly barks and sharply tears them for ever. They lie turning restlessly from side to side to shield themselves as they may. The stinking earth is more difficult lying than Francesca's bed, though if anyone were to discern a sexual interpretation in this circle, I do not know that he need be contradicted. Dante was writing about sex as well as all the rest. This is the result of prolonged incontinence, incontinence of mind as well as body; gluttony of delicacies as of vulgarities, of quality as well as quantity. The fatal development of sin in the soul might all be read in terms of gluttony as well as lechery. Over-indulgence, culpable delay, the beginning of perversion, is the same with whatever kind of flesh. Or mind or spirit.

Divination and Catholicism

One thing we can learn from the story of the three magi (Remembered and celebrated as the Feast of the Epiphany) is that astrology can lead to Christ, which was eloquently pointed out in my parish priest, Fr. Sean Finnegan's sermon on Sunday. He explained that we can see what are called types of the dying and rising god in mythologies across the world. These 'types' are prefigurings of Christ, who as C S Lewis said was the 'true myth' - all the other dying and rising gods had never claimed to inhabit actual historical time and space, the world of the mundane.

The learned, such as the three magi, Persian astrologers, would always have been able to study lore and the wisdom of the heavens (which is the stuff of myth), and been able to get an 'inkling' of this truth - the truth of Christ. Just as the Old Testament prophets foretold the coming of the Messiah, so the pagan wise men would have been able to study the signs which pointed to the cosmos-transforming moment of the incarnation and birth of the Christ child. 

That the study of the stars can lead to knowledge and wisdom is also evident from Psalm 19, which says:

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.

Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.

In Christian thought the creation is the work of the Logos, or Word of God, by which everything is set into harmony and given order. Indeed the word cosmos implies an ordered harmonious system. The heavens are the clearest place to look for the language of the Word which orders all, being as they are the domain of cyclical and regular movements of planets and stars. A horoscope, or birth chart, is simply a map of the movements of these heavenly bodies from a position on the Earth, or the intersection of time and space in a certain moment.

Whatever the 'star' was which the magi followed, whether it was an exceptionally bright conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn with Regulus, the star of Kings in the constellation of Leo, or some other less predictable phenomenon, doesn't matter too much - what we need to see is that the coming of the Christ not only utterly changed the world from that moment onwards, but also redeemed time past, and with it the cultures that inhabited those past times. That does not mean that any belief of any culture is equally valid or true, but that what truths pre-Christian cultures were able to discern can be 'taken up' into the Christian framework. In other words, it is possible and indeed necessary to 'baptise' what is true in pagan cultures.

In an excellent essay on esoteric Christianity Stratford Caldecott notes:

"A Jesuit contemporary of de Lubac’s puts the case more strongly: "It is partly because contemporary Christianity has failed to recognize the value, both immanent and transcendent, of the great symbols which are so prolific in its tradition and ritual that the human psyche is today possessed by so many demons and tempted to look elsewhere for symbols which can nourish it. It is not betrayal of the affirmations of the faith for the theologian to explore this dimension of religious symbolism, which has been too much neglected hitherto, and to accept in this matter the assistance of mythologists and psychologists."

Why then does the Church condemn astrology? As a system of divination, it is seen as an attempt to take on power that does not belong to one's self, so that one may be like God - ie. the promise of the serpent. In this sense astrology and divination can be tools of the heresy of gnosticism, which is to revel in an endless spiritual search on an intellectual level, thinking that one is possessed of all the answers, to which the common people are not party. It is thus world-denying and body-denying, as well as elitist. Divination can give us this false sense of power over fate, and can stop us from relying on the will of God, but rather helps to build up our own wills.

If astrology does not lead to Christ it leads to the Devil. In the letter The Hanged Man, of Valentin Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot, he talks about the 'zodiacalised will'. This is the will which has cut off its own inclinations and allowed the will of the heavens to work through it. It is only in this sense that astrology can be baptised. There is a Christian gnosis, as Balthasar writes:

"the gnostic Christian does not outgrow the proclamation of the Church, but in the kerygma he finds, revealing himself, the Logos, who, in the most comprehensive sense, ‘enlightens’ the believer ever more clearly and, indeed, draws him, as John was drawn, to his breast ever more intimately and unites him interiorly with himself.... What is here involved is, therefore, nothing other than the turning of faith to its own interior authenticity, as faith in a proposition (‘belief that Christ’) becomes faith in a person (‘faith in Christ’).... Truly to find the Father in the Son is to open up the sphere of absolute trinitarian truth, and of the knowledge in which we grow more deeply the more we entrust ourselves to the Son in faith and allow ourselves to be drawn into his innermost disposition. Christ turns to men, and says: ‘I give you the Logos, the gnosis of God; I give myself wholly to you. For I am he, and this is what God wills."

Of Hell and Hell Fire, a Mystic Reflection

Fathers and teachers, I ponder, "what is hell?" I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love. Once in infinite existence, immeasurable in time and space, a spiritual creature was given on his coming to earth the power of saying, "I am and I am love." Once, only once, there was given him a moment of active living love, and for that was earthly life given him, and with it times and seasons. And that happy creature rejected the priceless gift, prized it and loved it not, scorned it and remained callous. Such a one having left the earth, sees Abraham's bosom and talks with Abraham as we are told in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, and beholds heaven and can go up to the Lord. But that is just his torment, to rise up to the Lord without ever having loved, to be brought close to those who have loved when he has despised their love. For he sees clearly and says to himself, "Now I have understanding, and though I now thirst to love, there will be nothing great, no sacrifice in my love, for my earthly life is over, and Abraham will not come even with a drop of living water (that is the gift of earthly active life) to cool the fiery thirst of spiritual love which burns in me now, though I despised it on earth: there is no more life for me and will be no more time! Even though I would gladly give my life for others, it can never be, for that life is passed which can be sacrificed for love, and now there is a gulf fixed between that life and this existence."

From 'The Russian Monk'; Book VI of the Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A friend of mine recently told me of the deep sense of gratitude he experienced in relation to the actions of doctors and nurses who cared for his daughter when she had an illness. When he reflected on this he realised that it was possible to experience greater depths of thankfulness than he had previously imagined, or perhaps it was something in the nature of the gratitude he felt which seemed an almost numinous response to a gift he was powerless to give himself. After all the word gratitude stems from gratis, free.

In On Fairy Stories, Tolkien mentions that one of the purposes of fantasy is refreshment, to remake the world anew, so that it can offer itself back to you as the gift that it is, freed from the shackles of your own weariness of perception.

And thus fantasy, in essence myth, has a great moral element - it can enable us to see the world as gift and thus put us in right relation to the giver. And if we are also of the giver then we must be gift also, for others. A great sense of gratitude can pervade us when we really understand this, and also a great zeal to pour ourselves out for others, to be like the giver ourselves. If, like the rich man, we go through life not understanding this, how great a sadness that will be.

Of Maps Old and New Part Two

Charles Salvo posts that it is not possible for moderns to be naively and unconsciously 'Traditional', comparing the retro tastes of the modern hipster who opts for vinyl, pipe and formalwear to our own predicament:

"The millenial is acting ironically. He makes a conscious decision to reject the contemporary option; it is not a habit, but rather an acquired taste.

We are in an analogous position. The world of our fathers no longer exists, so we can't absorb that worldview automatically without thinking about it much. Quite the contrary, we are faced with a choice since the worldview of the modern world totally surrounds us. Hence, we can no longer be naive, but rather we need to know exactly why we adopt one worldview while rejecting its alternatives.

For the innocent man, the will follows the intellect which was formed by family, society and church. The man of experience needs to consciously create."

In my last post, I tried to articulate some of the issues surrounding the choice of worldviews, or maps, but only hinted at why someone might reject the modern map (or maps), and adopt an alternative 'traditional' one. Of course the classic study on this is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, in which he brings out the character of some of the different versions of these worldviews.

I mentioned the book The Gentle Traditionalist by Roger Buck, which articulates the argument for the orthodox Catholic worldview beautifully. But one major stumbling block that some may have with this is just that problem discussed above - that people like myself and Roger Buck are really just 'spiritual hipsters', choosing an outdated and retrogressive worldview just because it goes against the mainstream - we're just trying to be cool!

In one sense this is a definite danger. I want to point out here this excellent article about the 'Benedict Option', which both outlines this temptation, and gives the remedy.

The 'turn inwards' is the problem here. In declaring the world dangerous and pagan, and advocating a return to a monasticism and asceticism in Catholic communities which homeschool etc., the Benedict Option could tend towards a world-denying gnosticism, which would be to ignore the fact that, as the article above says, being Catholic is always a 'being-for-the-world'. 

So the spectre of the gnostic heresy still haunts the Christian - it is the subtlest error to fall into. The only way to guard against it is to remember Christ's injunction to take up your cross and follow Him. And He will always lead you out of yourself and towards the other. That's when you realise your cross is also the cross of others.

Edit: Roger Buck has pointed out that whilst the Christian life should be oriented towards the other, some are called to live apart from the world, and even those who work in the world need solitude in order to pray. The exemplar here is Christ who went away into the lonely places in order to pray, but the monastic element of Christianity has been fundamental to it. Valentin Tomberg said "Just as a fish needs water to breathe, so the monk needs the solitude of the cell".

Equally, the image on my post perhaps shows the absurdity of thinking you can change a culture from within; being in the world but not of it is the phrase that is usually used to describe the attitude I would want to emulate.
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Old and New Maps

The map is not the terrain.

But, the map is essential to negotiate the terrain. Given that no map can include everything, or it wouldn't be a map, some judgement would have to be made about what should go on it and what should be left off.

That judgement can often be to a large extent determined by the largely unconscious attitudes of the culture within which it is made.

F E Schumacher, in A Guide for the Perplexed, recounts the experience when in Leningrad, of looking for churches which he could see in front of him, but were not on his map. The authorities did not include 'living churches' on the map, only ones which had become museums. He likens this to the maps of life and knowledge given him at school and university which had virtually nothing on them of the things that seemed to him of the greatest importance to the conduct of his life. He began to suspect the soundness of the maps. 

The claim (is it even that? More an assumption) that all the maps made post-1968, or 1917, or 1789 are better by virtue of being more complete, or more faithful representations of reality, or having fewer errors than the old maps, is so widespread and accepted as to be a truism. But this could only be true if it were possible for maps to completely correspond to reality at some future point. But this is never possible; we have already seen that every map relies on a judgement of what should and should not be included. 

So no map just is the terrain, all maps are a symbolic way of describing the terrain, which will vary depending on what you want to achieve in that terrain. If you just want to get across it in as quick a time as possible, then your map is going to look very different from someone who wanted to spend time walking and enjoying scenic spots in it.

It is possible here to say: Yes, these maps do rely on judgements, but our judgements are more rational, they have greater warrant than the judgements that created the old maps. At this point we have come to a metaphysical claim, because such judgements can never be based solely on empirical observation. They are obviously prior to such observation.

If this point can be admitted by the modern 'secular' mind (which I have found it very rarely able to do), then usually the move is made to point to the peculiarly effective predictive power and usefulness of the modern map. And there is little doubt that many of the advances in material conditions of life for millions around the world, in medicine and in fairer conditions of living can fairly be said to be based on the effectiveness of the modern map.

But actually this tells us nothing about whether the judgement, the frame of reference within which the facts are embedded, is coherent or superior to the older frame of reference. All it tells us is that we have devised a map which, by narrowing its focus, and excluding many things which once were thought necessary to be included, and by a general process of flattening, has brought a kind of intense ability to predict and alter material conditions.

Indeed, the key feature of such a map is that its very effectiveness in this material direction creates a kind of inability on the part of the map-reader to perceive that they are actually using a map, and a belief that they are just negotiating reality 'as it is', neutrally, with no need for anything else.  

Actually, that 'neutral' map-that-is-no-map is aimed at getting us to some fairly specific places quickly. As such, it can say with Laplace: "God? We have no need of that hypothesis." 

Which brings me to the story told in Roger Buck's book, The Gentle Traditionalist. The book is a dialogue between two people with different maps, and as such is an excellent imaginative exposition of what I have been trying to say here, as well as so much more. 

In the book, we are shown the poverty and incoherence of much of the 'Enlightenment' map, and given a tour of the richness of the traditional map. We are treated to some great moments, one of my favourites being a visit from Rigid Dorkins, and his encounter with the Gentle Traditionalist, who ends up reciting 'St. Patrick's Breastplate' (a prayer for spiritual protection) to heal a 'breach' resulting from the visit!

It really is through stories like this that justice can be done to the truth of the old maps. Tolkien, Belloc and Chesterton knew this, so does Roger Buck!

I'll finish with a quick story of my own - I am teaching the topic Myth and Symbol to my A Level class and I was trying to explain that whilst myth did not necessarily convey facts, it still conveyed 'truths' at some level. I explained that poetry and prose did something similar, and that great truths could be learnt about human nature through the study of literature. I had thought this uncontroversial, but some students thought I was wrong, and that no 'truth' could be conveyed in this way. They were not to be persuaded through much argument. This alone should be evidence enough of the power of the modern map-that-is-no-map.

Edit: I perhaps should say that the student thought that stories, myths and poetry could be meaningful, but unless they contained facts they could not convey truths! I could say many things to this but I think this image is eloquent:

Stepping out of the Night

What is Advent? Many answers can be given. We can grumble and say that it is nothing but a pretext for hectic activity and commercialism, prettified with sentimental cliches in which people stopped believing ages ago. In many cases this may be true, but it is not the whole picture. 
We can say the reverse, that Advent is a time when, in the midst of an unbelieving world, something of the luminous quality of this lost faith is still perceptible, like a visual echo. Just as stars are visible long after they have become extinct, since their erstwhile light is still on its way to us, so this mystery frequently offers some warmth and hope even to those who are no longer able to believe in it.
We can say that Advent is a time when old customs live again, for instance, in the singing of carols that takes place all over the country. In the melodies and words of these carols, something of the simplicity, imagination and glad strength of the faith of our forefathers makes itself heard in our age, bringing consolation and encouraging us to have another go at that faith which could make people so glad in such hard times.

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, Seek That Which Is Above

One evening last week I went to the local supermarket with my family. As we walked in we could hear the sound of carol singers, the local Rotary Club, who do it every year. My daughter pulled me over to them, intrigued by the singing. We sat down at a table to listen, and I was handed a pamphlet by one of the singers and invited to join in as they sang Hark The Herald Angels Sing.

As we sang I became aware of the song as something wonderfully, unapologetically subversive and incongruous in those surroundings. The lyrics lay it on thick:

Christ, by highest heav'n adored:
Christ, the everlasting Lord;
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the favoured one.
Veil'd in flesh, the Godhead see;
Hail, th'incarnate Deity

and later

Hail! the heav'n born Prince of peace!
Hail! the Son of Righteousness!
Light and life to all he brings,
Risen with healing in his wings
Mild he lays his glory by,
Born that man no more may die:
Born to raise the sons of earth,
Born to give them second birth.
Hark! the herald angels sing,
"Glory to the newborn King!"

The 'glad strength of the faith of our forefathers' came through to me as I sang, and I allowed the full cognitive dissonance of the situation to hit home - the scandal of God made flesh, the unveiled theophany of the Godhead, on a Tuesday evening in a Waitrose in Surrey.

When another, deeper reality breaks through into the transience and paleness of this world, it brings consolation and awakens the memory of the heart which looks to the star of hope. This advent, it is good to clear away extraneous things, so that you may listen more clearly with the ears of the heart.

All Saints

All Saints

The paired feasts of All Saints and All Souls begin the month of November during which the Church encourages us to meditate on the fact that here on earth we have no abiding city. Which is a posh way of saying that our life here on earth is rather like a railway waiting room: sufficient, I suppose, for a while, but growing increasingly uncomfortable as the time goes on, what with old age, arthritis &c. This is for the very good reason that a waiting room is for waitng in, not for living in. And if we set about making ourselves too much at home here (to stretch the analogy stll further), we might well fnd that when the train comes, we will be so hampered by the baggage we have accumulated that we end up missing the train.
The point I want to make is that this world is not our home, and it is a good idea to keep our bags packed and not make ourselves too comfortable. We keep before our minds the fact that we are only here in order to catch the train—if we get the train, we have achieved the point of being here. If not, then not.
Saints and Holy Souls are there to remind us of those who have gone before us. Saints represent those who have already reached the fnal destnation, of whom we may have known many who have never been formally canonized, and Holy Souls represent those who are firmly on the train, assured of their arrival, but have not yet got there, having too much of the waitng-room still around them.
Now clearly Purgatory is, somewhat like the train, only an analogy. There is no ‘place’ as such, but it is what we call a ‘state’. What we mean is that we retain all our individuality and personality after death, and that individuality and personality carries an awful lot of baggage, as every one of us knows. There must be few who die as saints; our excess weight is going to have to be exercised off (changing analogy again) before we can be reckoned as saints. Which is why I find the analogy of a gym quite useful: going to a gym is a good and fruitul exercise which we can entirely see the point of since it makes us better and happier, even if people say ‘no pain, no gain’. I think Purgatory must be like that: Newman wrote of the purifcaton of Purgatory as a pain that the Holy Souls ‘joy to undergo’. And if we are prepared to undergo the unpleasantness of Ryanair to get to our holiday destnation, we might possibly begin to see something of the point of Purgatory.

Fr. Sean Finnegan