Harvesting Darkness: Essays on Literature, Myth, Film and Culture

By Dennis Patrick Slattery

As Dennis Patrick Slattery's writing shows, the very stuff of the great traditions is life itself, and the hurly-burly of current culture is the ground in which tradition thrives. Slattery's analyses are keen and thoughtful, often scholarly, and always deeply spiritual. But they are better for being a bit pugnacious and intimate and virile. They give evidence of a life lived in earnest, one in which nothing is walled off into a category but all enters into the whole that is the mysterious grounding of the person.

Foreword by Louise Cowan, Author of The Fugitive Group
Series Editor: The Terrain of Comedy, The Epic Cosmos, And The Tragic Abyss.
Founder: Institute of Philosophic Studies, The University of Dallas; the Teachers' Academy at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 6, 2006
• ISBN: 9780595828319

Dennis Patrick Slattery

Dennis Patrick Slattery is a core faculty member in the mythological studies program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. He is the author, co-author, editor, or coeditor of seventeen books, including four volumes of poetry. Slattery and his wife Sandy live in Texas.

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Copyright © 2006 by Dennis Patrick Slattery

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1

Dante’s Image of Hope in

Paradiso

2

Speaking, Reflecting, Writing: The Myth of Narcissus and

Echo

3

Pan, Myth and Fantasy in

Dostoevskii’s The Idiot

4

Watery Worlds/Watery Words: IshmaeVs (W)rite of Passage in

Moby-Dick

5

Imagining the Stuff of the World: Reflections on Gaston

Bachelard and Ivan Illich.

6

The Hysterical Body of Nature

in Thebes and Salem Village

7

Writing in the Face of Disease and Grief

8

The Via Dollarosa: Money

Matters in Huckleberry Finn

9

Demeter-Persephone and the

Alien(s) Cultural Body

10

Of Corpses and Kings: Sophocles’ Antigone and the

Body Politic

11

Auguste Rodin’s Shadowy

Wounded Bodies

12

Poetry, Prayer and Meditation

13

From Spirit to Flesh:

Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire

14

The Voice of Violence—Its

Afflicted Utterance

15

The Soul’s Soundings

16

He, The Silent One, Stands in the Pause Between Breaths : Poetry’s Invocation to Silence

17

Narcissus, Echo and Irony’s

Resonance

18

The Myth of Nature and the Nature of Myth: Becoming

Transparent to Transcendence

19

The Stories on Our Shelves

20

The Power and the Glory of

Books

21

Feeling the Pull of the Journey: A Final Pilgrimage into

Eternity

22

Crossing the Grandparent

Divide

23

A Symbol Borne on the High

Seas

24

Parentless at 60

25

Requiem for a Pet

26

Are We Losing Ritual’s

Importance?

Acknowledgements

About the Author

For Mary Elizabeth Slattery And Sandy Slattery

„Donne ch‘avete intelleto d‘amore." Purgatorio 24.50.

Incipit

In understanding the relation of poetry to contemplation the first thing that needs to be stressed is the essential dignity of aesthetic experience. Thomas Merton, Poetry and Contemplation: A Reappraisal.

Foreword

Dennis Patrick Slattery is hardly capable of being contained in a single category. Poet, essayist, depth psychologist, mythographer, literary critic, teacher, hearty Irishman and spiritual seeker, he ranges from the Divine Comedy, about which he can remark that Christ is a memorial-teleological image because he resides at the end of history, to Patricia Berry’s comment that true sexuality is dirty. His emphasis is on the glory—and the downright fascination—of the body, its vulnerability, its being in time, its connection with the world soul, and its attraction to violence. In the present volume, Slattery ranges from Dante, Dosto-evsky, Keats, and Hopkins to Foucault, Ivan Illich, and Wim Wenders. Nothing human is alien to him because his imagination is deeply and irreparably—in both body and spirit—human.

Though his essays in this volume focus on theological, psychological, and mythological matters as well as literary ones, Slattery is at his best when he fixes himself soundly in the poetic universe and speaks from within its organic wholeness, drawing upon and combining these other disciplines but keeping his foot firmly rooted in a mimetic cosmos. For, despite his wide competence in multiple modes of thought, his imagination is grounded in poetry, which is able to combine in one mimetic frame all the dimensions of life that can be viewed from a particular perspective. And this is to say that Slattery reads and thinks by means of the analogies to which literature gives rise, exploring variously the realms mentioned in Dante’s letter to Can Grande (contested though it may be), describing the four hermeneutic senses in which the Divine Comedy is to be read. These expanding circles of meaning, for Slattery, embrace the literal, psychological, mythical, and mystical. Dante called them the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, but we have become unaccustomed to such terms in our day and tend to invest them with a rigidity and a dogmatic quality which was alien to the medieval mind. Slattery moves about in this polysemousness with agility. His hearty ebullience is as much at home with the crystalline spheres of Dante’s primum mobile as with the blood-hungry shades of Homer’s underworld. Where could he have learned to feel so much at ease with all these recondite sources?

Slattery came to the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas because he was attracted to the brilliant Jungian-phe-nomenological-mythological psychology of James Hillman, Robert Sardello, and Robert Romanyshyn (for, different though their approaches may have been, their mode of thinking was harmonious). And, though their insights no doubt provided the enlightenment for which he sought—still it was Homer and Dante, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky who made available a world in which he could locate the penetrating insights generated by psychology and mythology. For the abode of these disciplines is not the flat, literal world of fact, nor is it any kind of rationalistic and abstract system. Their insights require the image of an entire, self-contained form, a world that endows them with a dialogical possibility. It is thus in another complete and coherent universe than the literal that psyche can be observed to operate. The curriculum at the University of Dallas brought into the intellectual mix assembled around poetry not only Greek epic and tragedy, but the Greek gods, Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Nietzsche; and it is interesting indeed to see in Slattery’s writing what all these disparate visions do when they make a whole in a single fertile mind.

The results are illuminating. For it is obvious that the great books, by which title these texts tend all too often to be limited to a sterile existence and kept strictly away from any whiff of current culture, thrive on being jostled about a bit. They can take on contemporary film and music, tangle with current culture, as Slattery makes them do, bleeding here and there but casting a cocky eye over the bandages, walking away from the fight with a jaunty air. You should see the other guy, they say, a bit sheepishly.

For, as Slattery’s writing shows, the very stuff of the great tradition is life itself; and the hurly burly of current culture is the ground in which tradition thrives. Slattery’s analyses are keen and thoughtful, at times scholarly, and always deeply spiritual. But they are better for being a bit pugnacious and intimate and virile. They give evidence of a life lived in earnest, one in which nothing is walled off into a category, but all enters into the whole that is the mysterious grounding of the person. These essays may perhaps be the heralding of the end of what we have been for too long now calling personality, considering individual persons to be atoms subject to their own isolated whims and quirks. For these essays, full of whimsiness and quirkiness, nevertheless, in their identification with what they describe, express not a personality, but a personhood. They become not exactly masks, but rather mimes, various actings-out, soundings of the whole, indicating what it’s like to be at a certain depth and angle—and then another and another. Slat-tery knows that the white whale is uncapturable. It’s the chase that matters—no, it’s what one sees and hears and bangs up against on the chase. And the enterprise is deadly serious. As Ishmael says, after the first lowering, we’d better go below and write our wills.

At the Institute of Philosophic Studies and then later at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture (in both of which institutions Slattery was intimately involved), we had in mind the aim of producing a new kind of literary study. It would cast off its late nineteenth-century airs of a scholarship limited to English and American studies, specialized and detached, quantitative and factual. But neither would it be based on the relativism implied in the term ‘comparative.’ It would be creative, committed, speculative, and passionate—the study of literary works as life-changing documents, small universes in which other disciplines could discern by analogy their true roles in the human spectrum. It would produce writers and thinkers at home in the present culture, able to bring to bear on current issues the whole weight of the past.

Dennis Patrick Slattery is such a thinker. He weaves together insights from various disciplines, viewed always in the light of poetry—which is to say viewed by analogy within a formed universe. We have in these essays, then, an empathic imagination: one in which the learned person is not remote, superior, lonely, and detached, but involved, exhilarated, and woven so deeply into what is under discussion that it seems useless to try to extricate him, or to speak of subjectivity or objectivity—and one ends by swallowing it all whole. It is a new kind of scholarship, coming from a life examined and lived in full.

Louise Cowan, January 2006

University Professor

Cowan Chair in Literature

The University of Dallas

Introduction

I begin this collection of essays with a recollection. Every story seeds an attempt to retrieve some beginning, some origin lost in the mist of history. To attempt to separate one’s story from one’s history is an impossible task, one that can rupture the fabric of complexity that is one’s evolving narrative. So, here is my story. It surfaced two nights ago at 2 a.m. with such force that it woke me out of a deep sleep. That is where the story had been hiding and hibernating for decades, only now wishing to be remembered.

When I was 20, I found myself working as a deputy bailiff in a Municipal Court in Euclid, Ohio and attending night school at Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College which had opened only a few years earlier. The present time was 1966. In a class on Social Theory, I met a fellow by the name of Dennis Collins, son of a real estate broker on Cleveland’s West side. Dennis worked downtown at The Cleveland Plain Dealer. We both knew a college degree was important, but neither of us had our hearts in our studies. Our feet moved under our desks with the rhythm of a journey end-stopped. We listened to the lectures, attempted to participate and felt closer to the listlessness of mud than to any desire to learn.

After class one night a week we would walk to a bar in the area and share our mutual frustrations. Both of us realized we had positions of some relevance, plenty of money and a deepening miasma of ennui. One night, after garaging a few beers, we drove down to the Cleveland docks along the shores of Lake Erie; it was late spring and we wanted to feel the breeze slipping off the Lake which had now shed its winter ice, to look out at that darkness beckoning both of us and to entertain the growing fantasy of heading out for the territory, wherever that might be. We saw that the dock steward’s office was open, so we entered with no particular questions in mind. The man asked what we wanted; we obliged. We asked if one could book passage and travel on one of the many freighters from around the globe that docked in the Cleveland port.

He looked at us astonished. Well, he said, How would you like to work your passage on a German freighter due in here in 10 days. Its destination is the large port of Bremerhaven in Germany. No money, but no cost to you if you are willing to work. The crew is shorthanded and the captain of the vessel called ahead to see if I could find at least three crew hands for his ship. It is named H.M.S. Transamerica and operated by Poseidon Lines in Hamburg.

We looked at one another, speechless. The moment had arrived, pulled into port ahead of the ship. We signed on now or went back to drinking beer after class. We took a moment, then assented, said we would be at the dock at 9 p.m. ready to sail, in ten days. We scurried for passports, moved our final exam in the Sociology class forward with the help of the professor, and in ten days stood in the dim light of a summer sunset, each of us with one army green duffle bag, ready to board what for us seemed a massive ship.

The crossing lasted 21 days in all, for, as a merchant ship, filled with German men fulfilling their military duty by working as merchant seamen, we picked up goods in Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec before sailing out the Gaspe Peninsula and into the North Atlantic. Together, we were 11 days crossing the Atlantic to Germany’s large port. On that voyage we were assigned as the crew’s mess boys, serving meals five times a day and in between, cleaning cabins. Twelve paying passengers came aboard in Quebec, but most stayed in their cabins, seasick, for most of the voyage. We worked around their green nausea.

The power and beauty of the Atlantic Ocean stirred something deep within me—a combination of fear at its majesty and an immense delight at its beauty. We suffered two devilish storms, passed two days through a garden of icebergs, changed course to avoid whales sleeping on the water’s surface, learned many of the more obscene words in

German, made fast friends with several of the German crew, and went days without eating to counteract debilitating sea-sickness.

Every night on the aft of the ship, where seagulls which had followed us all day, eating the slop from the buckets we heaved overboard after every meal, perched for the night, I wrote in my journal. I loved and waited for those moments of writing, when I would record all the events and impressions of the day. It was my only solitude. My friend and I shared a tiny cabin in the hold of the ship, with the large pistons of the ship’s engine pounding just a metal sheet away from us. I found that I loved to record in the evening, with seagulls gathered around me to read over my shoulder, what had occurred both outside and inside of me during the day.

From our destination in Germany, we hitchhiked west, towards Ireland where we both had relatives expecting us. After many weeks touring Germany, England, Wales, southern and northern Ireland and sleeping on the couches of relatives’ modest cottages in County Mayo on the west coast, we flew home from Shannon airport, frustrated by repeated attempts to book passage on an Irish freighter sailing to New York out of Belfast’s port. Too many Irish youths at the time, 1966, were abandoning their depressed homeland and limited job opportunities for more promising shores.

So why this story at the bow of a collection of writings? When I arrived home, I enrolled in another school in Cleveland. There I chose Literature as my major and began reading every sea story I could lay my hands and eyes on: Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, The Bounty Series, the sea stories of Joseph Conrad, Homer’s Odyssey, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, The Captain Hornblower series of sea tales, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and others. At the same time, I developed the habit, after purchasing a small portable Olympia typewriter, of typing my journal notes into the form of a memoir of the voyage and its aftermath. I enjoyed this process and let the literary sea voyages I was reading merge with my own experience. I realized from this reading and writing that if stories could so illuminate and deepen my own understanding of my voyage, that this indeed was a subject worth studying. Far from draining my own experience from me, these classic works enhanced, deepened, and made more graspable the mystery of the voyage.

I did not realize until years later what an enormous and formative threshold I had just traversed on those often troubled and tumescent Atlantic waters. Exuberance lifted me on every wave of discovery that I enjoyed while reading the literature that took me deeper into the fathom folds of my own experience. I had come face-to-face with what I learned later was Aristotle’s sense of mimesis and would be C.G. Jung’s grasp of the nature of analogy: there I learned that something imaginal had the potency to reverberate in and even change the geography, if not the climate, of one’s soul. Now, I understood, the real voyage was ready to launch. What a suffering and sublime pilgrimage it has unfolded over decades.

At the same time, in these pre-copying machine days, I finished my journal, which was now fast approaching 150 pages, and loaned it to someone who subsequently lost it. Since I had misplaced my journal at the same time, the stories were lost, deep-sixed into oblivion. But I had gained an insight into my life’s work: literature and writing.

So there is the story, one I believe is most appropriate to introduce these essays that span just the leeward side of 25 years. I think they reveal a progression of thought and a maturing of a style—indeed its own voyage through uncharted seas.

Nor could the time for writing over the years, or the collection’s congealing, have occurred without outside assistance. To my wife, Sandy, I thank for her patience and encouragement over almost four decades now in coaxing me to tack into the winds of my desire as a writer. I owe her a fresh water sea of gratitude.

To Lesley Finalyson of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s library for so quickly and accurately scanning many of the articles into a form I could incorporate, and to Mark Kelly for assisting me in all things electronic; to Charles Asher, Louise Cowan, Edie Barrett, Patrick

Mahaffey, Toni D’Anca, Allen Tate Wood, Mary Watkins, Ginette Paris, Steve Aizenstat, Dyane Sherwood, Katherine Madden, Christine Downing, Peter Phan, Stephen Swecker, Frank Michaelson, Reverend Tony and Victoria Howard, Evans Lansing Smith, William Doty, David Miller, Rick Tarnas, Glen Slater, Stephanie Pope, Robert Romanyshyn, Ginger Grant, Tiare Newport, Kim Brawn, Robyn Cass, Michael Hommel, James Peltz, Nancy Cater, Julianna Gustafson, Thomas Moore, Cynthia Hale, Walter Odajnyk, Roger Barnes, Basil Aivaloitis, Reverend Barbara Child, James Hillman, Maureen Murdock, Larry and Claudia Allums, Murphy Lewis, and so many of my students over the years who have supported and encouraged my prosaic, often profane efforts.

I express deep gratitude to my mother, Mary Elizabeth, for her consistent inspiration in my early years, to my sister, Mary Beth, to brothers Marty, Bill, and Bob for their unflagging support through the years, and for their abiding friendship as we ripen in unison.

And to my sons Matthew and Stephen, who seem always to enjoy the pieces of prose I send their way for review and comment. All of you, and others unnamed, provided the energy necessary to keep the sails aloft, the seas manageable, and the compass heading due North, to where the invisibles reside just below the water line, enwombed in their own tranquil surety.

1

Dante’s Image of Hope in

Paradiso

♦

(1980)

In their creation of poetic images, few poets have approached Dante’s mastery. This situation is not surprising, for even fewer have dared to depict anima statum post-mortem, the world of the state of souls after death. It is, indeed, as if fear of abstraction caused Dante to cling to the concrete and sensible world. As a poetic expression of a remembered experience. Dante’s Commedia is rooted in history. The poem concerns itself with the soul’s historical journey towards the spiritual presence of God embodied in Christ. To this end, Dante’s final vision in Paradiso 33 succeeds in poetically uniting the divine revelation of God with the hope of salvation for man. God’s kingdom is revealed to Dante in a climactic vision in Canto 33. which concludes his journey through the worlds where the souls of those who have died express divine justice.

Salvation for the pilgrim Dante, however, is yet forthcoming. We should keep in mind that in his final vision Dante is not proclaiming his own salvation. His vision is of a new life that he must yet live out, not in the world inhabited by the state of souls after death, as he writes in his alleged Letter to Can Grande (37), but in the human world we all inhabit. For just as God in His eternity became, through Christ, man in his temporality, so Dante as Everyman enters eternity while maintaining human temporality. As Jean Mouroux has observed.

God’s eternity is the essential foundation stone of man’s time (The Mystery of Time, 25). An examination of how revelation and salvation unite in Dante’s vision both history, or kronos, with a realization of the divine kingdom, in kairos, to create the fullest image of hope for man is a primary concern in Paradiso xxxiii. Here Dante dies to his human self and is reborn in Christ through the image offered in the last canto of the poem. He is born, finally, into an attitude of hope, guided by love, that offers a renewed faith in the possibility of salvation. This, it seems to me, is what Dante understands by the presence of grace, as an intrusion or penetration of Eternity in time.

A further accomplishment in his last vision is the poet’s realization of a sense of proportion between the eternal kingdom and the temporal human world. This same idea is present in Romano Guardini’s observation that the Middle Ages had a dual vision of man: he is at once a creature of God, submissive to His will, and yet as a bearer of God’s image, is destined for an eternal end (The End of the Modern World, 17). Dante’s accomplishment is a final expression of the analogical relationship between the infinite and the finite natures of man. His achievement is what Allen Tate describes as an act of the symbolic imagination, which conducts an action through analogy of the human to the divine, of the natural to the supernatural, of the low to the high, of time to eternity (The Symbolic Imagination 427).

Within the center of the relationship between the two aspects of man’s nature lies, as William Lynch rightly suggests, the virtue of hope. According to Lynch hope rests in the very heart and center of the person (Images of Hope 7), and through hope man is healed. As a healer, hope knits together the fabric of man’s divine and human cloak. By hoping, man is able to experience salvation as a real possibility, for in hope one can imagine the possibilities that are revealed in moments of insight.

Dante’s beatific vision is just such an insight, an image of hope both for him and for any person who is willing to gaze on it. As an image of hope, the beatific vision opens out to a possible world toward which one may journey and which one may achieve within this historical world. In fact, Dante’s final vision in Paradiso is a more penetrating journey into actual reality—into the reality in which hope is possible—than is his vision of Satan. His beatific vision is more actual for it promises still more. It promises more because neither Dante the pilgrim nor Dante the poet has realized it completely. Moreover, as an image it captures the two fundamental dimensions of temporal-ity—kronos and kairos. An apprehension of these two modes of time promotes an understanding of Dante’s final vision of God as an image of hope. Thus, his image is both reflective and refractive.

Within the world of the Commedia, Dante is in the realm of kairos, or sacred time. Kairos is the time of revelation. Paul Tillich suggests that kairos includes the moment in history when the Kingdom of God was manifested in the appearance of Jesus as the Christ (Systematic Theology, III, 370). All time reached its fulfillment in this event. The moment of Christ’s presence in the world, moreover, was both figured and prepared for in all the historical events antedating His appearance. I here use figure as Erich Auerbach understands figura, namely, as something real and historical which announces a later historical reality. The relation between the two events is revealed by an accord or similarity (Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, 29). As the revelatory moment for man. Christ’s incarnation completes the sufferings and struggles. the doubts and wishes that contributed to man’s preparation. Time is different in preparation and event, the latter taking place in kairos and the former occurring in history, in kronos. Certainly Dante’s poem parallels or imitates both the action of kronos, the historical preparation, and kairos, that moment which fills with Christ’s presence. In this sense the poem is a figure of Christ’s historical presence in the world, in the city of man. The Commedia is unique in this respect because in its consideration of a journey through a world of souls after death, it analogically reflects man’s historical preparation in history, ending in Christ’s birth and journey through the finite world of man. Thus, a cyclic as well as mimetic structure is achieved, even fulfilled.

Furthermore, as an expression of Dante’s imaginatively remembered journey, which ends in his final vision, what is revealed to him forces him back into history, or kronos, even while his revelation occurs in sacred time, in kairos. Structurally then, the poem consistently maintains the tension between kronos and kairos, between revelation and salvation, between the human polis and the divine kingdom. As indicated earlier in Tate’s definition, herein lies the poem’s symbolic dimension. Dante sustains this tension best by creating in his beatific vision a concrete-universal image of hope.

Hoping for the eventual salvation of one’s soul occurs only in the lived, historical world of man. The image of hope Dante experiences in kairos returns him, as well as the reader of the Commedia, back into kronos. The order in which he relates his vision confirms this movement. First Dante tells us: In the profound and clear ground of the lofty light appeared to me three circles of three colors and of the same extent, and the one seemed reflected by the other as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other (Paradiso 33. 115-120). In this vision is the Triune God. But as Dante boldly continues to gaze upon it, he sees within the reflected light of the circles an image of man: That circling which, thus begotten, appeared in Thee as reflected light, when my eyes dwelt on it for a time, seemed to me, within it and in its own colour, painted with our likeness, for which my sight was wholly given to it (127-32). This image of man within the circles is God incarnate in the image of Christ.

The image is a figure of a reality. The actual reality is not within everyday experience. Though indeed revelatory, the image nonetheless does not guarantee or affirm salvation. What it does offer, however, is a believable possibility for Dante for which he may quest in the historical world. In offering the image of man last in his vision of God, Dante expects us to realize that it is this earthly world to which he is finally pointing and not to the heavenly world inhabited by the state of souls after death. His image illustrates how salvation, reflected in the mirror of what is revealed to him, forces one back into history, into human time, the finite ground of the possibility for salvation. Salvation becomes a reality only in and through journeying in time, even as poetic revelation provides an image of hope for what may in the future become actual. Such is the nature of the soul’s pilgrimage towards God.

A similar image of this hope Dante creates in his vision of God, an image which reveals an ineluctable intimacy between man and God. Both the human and the divine represent images of hope for Dante, which come together, while remaining separate and distinct, in the image of Christ at the center of the circles. Christ, then, appears as an embodied image of hope. As an image, Christ coalesces the spirit of God in His eternal presence to all creation with the likeness of man in his temporal presence to the world. In such a manner is Christ an image of hope for man.

As an image of hope, Christ unites the temporal world with the eternal kingdom. Stated another way, He is a memorial-teleological image in that He resides at the end of history, or at the end of kronos; but because of His embodied participation in the incomplete human historical world, Christ shares with man all of the concrete, limited, and finite struggles of being human. Christ is the image which enables the symbolic poet, as Tate describes his task, to return to the order of temporal sequence—to action (Symbolic Imagination, 428). Therefore, even though the three circles symbolize the end of history, or the perfect spherical movement of eternity, they are not without relation to history. The human dimension of history finds a place in the eternal kingdom through the medium of Christ. As an image that brings to its fullest synthesis both the finite and infinite dimensions of man’s nature, Christ offers hope to Dante for a possible final unity between the historical life of humanity and the eschatological reality of God’s kingdom.

Another illustration of Christ as an image of hope is presented in the course of Dante’s imaginative journey. His entire journey down through the Inferno then up through Purgatorio to Paradiso during Passion Week is a poetic imitation of Christ’s descent into hell and ascension into heaven. Through this action Dante realizes the hope for the kingdom of God in Christ. He may then hope within the historical world for what he has analogically completed in the poetic world. The literal level of the poem, the state of souls after death, reflects the kingdom of God, through the medium of Christ, back into the historical city of man. By using Christ as a mirror in which both divinity and humanity unite, Dante creates an image of the beatific vision as something for which man can hope. As Francis Fergusson points out, "the poetry of the Commedia.. .always points ahead and beyond its momentary beauty. It has its life between the ever-changing human spirit one way, and the unfathomable mystery of God, the object of faith, the other way" (Dante’s Drama of the Mind, 158).

There is a practical aspect of the entire poem that I wish here to make more explicit. In his epistle to Can Grande, Dante inveighs against those who read his poetry with a purely speculative attitude. For Dante, to do so is to limit his poetry; rather, his intention is for the poem to evoke in his readers a personal and practical response, with the end that the work will effect a moral transformation. He wishes his audience to yield to the truth of his poem and to be changed by it. As he writes:

The kind of philosophy under which this work proceeds in the whole and in the part is morals or ethics: because both whole and part are intended not for speculation but for implementation. For even though in some place or passage it is treated in the manner of speculative philosophy, this is not for the sake of speculation but for the sake of practice: because, as the Philosopher said in the second book of the Metaphysics, practical men sometimes speculate about such things. (Letter 40)

A closer examination of the image Dante envisions, within the context of the entire Canto will help to illustrate at least one way in which the poem may be implemented in one’s life—that is, through the act of hoping.

As already mentioned, hope is intimately involved with time. It is possible only within time. Patient, hope is able to wait; it knows how to allow the future to move toward the present at its own pace. Yet Dante, as we have also suggested, is in sacred time in the world inhabited by the souls of those who have died. As sacred time, kairos represents what Tillich refers to as the fulfillment of time, or the right time (Systematic Theology, 371). It is the time when Dante imagines his image of hope. That he begins to intuit or to feel this moment coming is evident in what he expressed just prior to his vision: And I, who was drawing near to the end of all desires, ended perforce the ardour of my craving (46-48). He speaks of desires and craving, but not of hope. For to hope is to be within the dimension of kronos, while here Dante is within kairos. The moment is ripe for him to envision Paradise. But how is the devout pilgrim/poet to convert from kairos back to kronos in a way that will inspire his readers not simply to believe what he tells them he has seen but finally to act on and be changed by it? Through his subtle poetic genius, kairos and kronos merge in the figure he creates, wherein Christ, as an image of hope, commingles kairos and kronos. At this moment Dante’s experience is elevated to the level of joy. Josef Pieper captures this relation between hope and joy when he writes that what is hoped for is something welcome, desirable, beloved, something good which it is really possible for the hoper to obtain. That is why there can be no hope without an element of joy (Hope and History 20-21).

Earlier I pointed out that the historical order, the finite human reality, is able to express through Christ the eternal order, the infinite domain of salvation. Thus, Christ as the figure painted with our likeness (Paradiso 33.130) appears within the center of the three circles. But we are aware that Dante does not understand this image: I wished, he says. to see how the image was fitted to the circle and how it has its place there: but my own wings were not sufficient for that, had not my mind been smitten by a flash wherein came its wish (13840). How are we to understand this most complex image such that it can be, as Dante wishes it, implemented in our lives?

We can begin to penetrate the mystery of this image if we understand, first, that the image of Christ is at the center of all history and, second, that Dante imitates Christ’s action in his