Inferno: Canto 10 -- Circle 6
The dialogue between Farinata and Dante advances the plot significantly in that we learn how it is the dead like Ciacco can predict the future but like Cavalcanti cannot see the present. The answer is simple, Farinata explains, and forms part of the divine justice of hell -- things far off can be seen but as things get closer in time, they are lost to the damned. This far-sightedness of the dead will cause them to lose their knowledge altogether at the end of time, as Farinata relates: "So may you understand that all we know/ will be dead forever from that day and hour/ when the Portal of the Future is swung to" (106-8). We already know from Dante's earlier conversation with Virgil that the pain will be increased at the end of time, and it will be a pain void of intellect, a body writhing without knowledge of anything.
Although the dead can remember their own present fairly well and have a constant influx of new company with which they might discuss events current at the time their company arrives, there is the sense that even though they know of one another's presence, they don't communicate with one another. Cavalcanti's interruption of Farinata, for instance, doesn't deflect the latter from his train of thought in the least though he pauses to allow the interruption. Cavalcanti, in fact, recognizes Dante's voice and immediately thinks that his own son has turned Aeneas to come and speak with him in the underworld. Not seeing Guido and perceiving Dante's use of the past tense followed by a hesitation, Calvalcanti naturally thinks that his son is dead before his time and sinks back down in despair. The end-times with its fugue would seem a comfort. Nonetheless, it's doubtful that Farinata relayed Dante's message to Cavalcanti.
It is also important to remember that we're in another kind of vestibule here -- an atrium, really -- to a city where the sins of perverse reasoning are punished. The heretics, in their unwillingness to accept the reality of G-D, will be sealed forever in fiery tombs after the last day. A willful disconnection from the fount of all things is the beginning of violence and fraud against neighbor, self, nature, and art, for all of these things are derived from the Creator.
S.
Although the dead can remember their own present fairly well and have a constant influx of new company with which they might discuss events current at the time their company arrives, there is the sense that even though they know of one another's presence, they don't communicate with one another. Cavalcanti's interruption of Farinata, for instance, doesn't deflect the latter from his train of thought in the least though he pauses to allow the interruption. Cavalcanti, in fact, recognizes Dante's voice and immediately thinks that his own son has turned Aeneas to come and speak with him in the underworld. Not seeing Guido and perceiving Dante's use of the past tense followed by a hesitation, Calvalcanti naturally thinks that his son is dead before his time and sinks back down in despair. The end-times with its fugue would seem a comfort. Nonetheless, it's doubtful that Farinata relayed Dante's message to Cavalcanti.
It is also important to remember that we're in another kind of vestibule here -- an atrium, really -- to a city where the sins of perverse reasoning are punished. The heretics, in their unwillingness to accept the reality of G-D, will be sealed forever in fiery tombs after the last day. A willful disconnection from the fount of all things is the beginning of violence and fraud against neighbor, self, nature, and art, for all of these things are derived from the Creator.
S.
posted by Sebastian Mahfood at 9:48 PM
9 Comments:
I understood in Canto X that Dante equates heresy with denial of eternal life. At first I found that curiously limited since there are so many other bedrock heresies, i.e. divinity of Christ. But on further reflection I find it quite fitting. The resurrection of Christ, and our hope of sharing in His Resurrection, is the practical cornerstone of our faith. St. Paul wrote, "If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain." Denial of the hope of eternal life in Christ is also fitting as Dante's template heresy as it is congruent with the classical sign over the entry to his Inferno, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." The Rite of Christian burial, in contrast, prays, "May faith be our consolation and eternal life our hope."
I understood in Canto X that Dante equates heresy with denial of eternal life. At first I found that curiously limited since there are so many other bedrock heresies, i.e. divinity of Christ. But on further reflection I find it quite fitting. The resurrection of Christ, and our hope of sharing in His Resurrection, is the practical cornerstone of our faith. St. Paul wrote, "If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain." Denial of the hope of eternal life in Christ is also fitting as Dante's template heresy as it is congruent with the classical sign over the entry to his Inferno, "Abandon all hope ye who enter here." The Rite of Christian burial, in contrast, prays, "May faith be our consolation and eternal life our hope."
Good point, Fr. Earl -- it's a specific kind of denial of G-d -- the denial of G-d's presence in our lives as a generative force that enables our resurrection in both body and soul. Ultimately, it's a denial of Christ's promise and of the cosmic order. It's a devotion to the material rather than the transcendent.
Longfellow's translation (which I'm using here because I'm away from my Ciardi text at the moment) reads: "Their cemetery have upon this side/ With Epicurus all his followers,/ Who with the body mortal make the soul" (13-5). Sir Thomas Browne's (1867) notation on this in Urn Burial, Chapter IV (which I'm also taking from the Longfellow translation), reads of this circle devoted to Epicurus, "Epicurus lies deep in Dante's hell, wherein we meet with tombs enclosing souls, which denied their immortalities." Browne speculates, moreover, on "whether the virtuous heathen, who lived better than he spake, or, erring in the principles of himself, yet lived above philosophers of more specious maxims, lie so deep as he is placed, at least so low as not to rise against Christians, who, believing or knowing that truth, have lastingly denied it in their practice and conversation, -- were a query too sad to insist on." Is it better, that is, to be a virtuous pagan and have lived without the light of G-d or to be someone born with Christianity fully revealed and yet deny it?
Though an academic question when pitted against the theological reality of denying G-d's presence in our lives, Burton draws from Seneca in Anatomy of Melancholy, Part II. Sec. 2. Mem. 6. Subs. I, to Epicurus's credit. He writes, "A quiet mind is that voluptas, or summum bonum of Epicurus; non dolere, curis vacare, animo tranquillo esse, not to grieve, but to want cares, and have a quiet soul, is the only pleasure of the world, as Seneca truly recites his opinion, not that of eating and drinking, which injurious Aristotle maliciously puts upon him, and for which he is still mistaken, mala audit et vapulat, slandered without a cause, and lashed by all posterity" (italics mine). In effect, Epicurus denied the salvific quality of G-d's presence in our lives as that which could be the overriding pleasure of the world -- but I call it academic because Epicurus was a pagan anyway (341 B.C.-271 (270) B.C.), and Dante still put him here with those who openly denied the existence of a soul. Had Dante gone with what Burton says is Aristotle's malice, then he would have placed Epicurus, pagan still, in the third circle. Placing Epicurus here is an indication that Dante focused more on his being as a man who denied the immortal existence in deference to the material. Farinata and Cavalcanti, because they did the same, are his followers and join him here.
S.
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