Canto 19, Paradiso - Understanding is Not Following
Canto 19 presents one of the most difficult conundrums of universal or catholicChristianity.
ché tu dicevi: ‘Un uom nasce a la riva / de l’Indo, e quivi non è chi ragioni / di Cristo né che legga né chi scriva; / e tutti suoi voleri e atti buoni / sono, quanto ragione umana vede, / sanza peccato in vita o in sermoni. / Muore non battezzato e sanza fede: / ov’ è questa giustizia che ‘l condanna? / ov’ è la colpa sua, se ei non crede?’
for you have said: ‘A man is born along the river / Indus, and there is no one who would discourse / of Christ nor who would read nor would write; / and all his desires and acts are / good, as much as human reason sees, / without sin in life or speaking. / He dies not baptized and without faith: / where is this justice that condemns him? / where is his fault, if he does not believe?’
This is the spatial equivalent to the earlier temporal question of the virtuous pagan born before Christ. Dante/the pilgrim recognizes that virtue is not the lone purview of Christianity and that The One True Faith™ is no guarantor of simple decency. How, then, can the divine justice condemn a man simply because he was born outside the reach of the various institutions that are meant to spread that faith throughout the world? The first answer is a rather curt “fuck you! what do you know about the mind of God!?” The following answer is more revealing. Granted, no one can enter Heaven who is not a Christian; however, there are many who profess the faith who will never even dream of touching the most remote grain of sand at the base of Mt. Purgatory. The point is made that the virtuous Indian may not enter Heaven, but he will be far closer to God than these self-professed people of faith.
This still seems rather harsh, about as satisfying as the whole experience of finding Statius in Purgatory was for Virgil. Limbo may be a clever copout–give those pagans what they think the afterlife is!–but it is still a copout. Given how Dante rehearses a rather tired argument (the Lord moves in mysterious ways) in addition to covering ground already well trod in the Inferno, what could be the point of all this?
E cominciò: “Per esser giusto e pio / son io qui essaltato a quella gloria / che non si lascia vincere a disio; / e in terra lasciai la mia memoria / sì fatta, che le genti lì malvage / commendan lei, ma non seguon la storia.”
And it began: “For being just and pious / am I here exalted to that glory / that cannot be overcome by desire; / and on earth I left the memory of me / so made, that the wicked people there / commend it, but follow not the story.”
Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach gives us one of the great maxims of all time: “philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Marx speaks to one of the great frustrations with intellectuals and analysis in general, that all this theory and theoretical speculation seems to have no end in mind or, even worse, that the analysis itself is the end… HIGH FIVE, BRO! I was never a complete fan of Marx, for a variety of reasons, but I have to admit, even as an academic, feeling a gnawing lack of satisfaction in my critical triumphs, for they rarely seemed to amount to more than paeans to my own cleverness. I cannot imagine anyone has ever read any of my published work and thought to themselves, “I am transformed!”
The just and dutiful (i.e. pio) soul adds to the purely hypothetical argument about some dude in India a bit of necessary grounding in the practical. It is one thing to understandthe virtue of someone’s life, but it is another thing entirely to follow the example. All of this might not rise above the level of theoretical speculation, if it weren’t for that last clause, ma non seguon la storia, “but follows not the story,” which brings us back to the complex system of the poem itself, where it is both an examination of a particular mode of reading as well as a text to be submitted to that very mode. Moreover, what is left on earth is the memory of this soul, just as the poem is framed in terms of the memory of the pilgrim’s journey. To commend the memory but follow not the story is, in many ways, precisely what I am doing here in analyzing Dante’s Comedy in the lit crit mode in which I and many like me were trained.
But that lit crit mode is not the end of these essays, for, if I’m not always willing to shed my rot-in-the-ground atheism, I am willing to follow the poem ethically. I suppose this is why I identify so thoroughly with Virgil, not because I have any pretensions to poetic genius, but because I have the capacity to know what it is I am looking at but am too proud to ever think I could be part of it. However, like the man born along the shores of the Indus, I’ll be closer to the divine than those who profess their righteousness yet fail to comprehend what it should entail.
There is a word of warning in this canto about the purview of pride. The just soul notes how even after creating the universe with His compass, God had so little of His infinitude depleted in the process that He still needed an infinity to fill with His glory. Not even the highest of all creatures (Satan himself) could contain even a fraction of it, and so he, in his pride, fell from grace for thinking his own understanding of the world could ever suffice to be comparable to God’s. Now, I would never claim that my powers of comprehension could even begin to compare with the infinite, and I think that’s fine by me. I would much rather aspire to the Socratic standard: to know what I don’t know and act accordingly.
[Image - Bible Moralisee]
