Tea at Trianon: Dante and Liberty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, August 13, 2021

Dante and Liberty

From Law and Liberty:

Liberty is a cornerstone of The Divine Comedy. “He’s in search of liberty,” Virgil says of Dante in Purgatory. And in Paradise, where man is truly free, we see liberty closely tied to motion and God’s love. But before Dante can ascend to God, he must descend into Hell. He must see what it means to be deprived of God’s love and the manifold ways we can be enslaved. He must understand that liberty is possible only with order. Every sinner in Hell is an example of a life without order. Dante’s encounter with these very human sinners shows him how evil can assume many different forms, how sins beget sins, and how easily we can reject liberty without even knowing it.

Hell is rigidly ordered in accordance with God’s will, consisting of nine circles divided into three broad types of evil, listed in order of increasing severity: incontinence, violence, and deceit. It is important to note that the punishments meted out in Hell are less divine vengeance than they are the inevitable outcome of the way the sinners lived their lives. They freely chose to do this to themselves. Their punishment in Hell—the contrapasso—is the logical extension of what they were doing in life. A sinner on earth who fails to repent and change his ways is already living his own punishment. We need not subscribe to Dante’s religious worldview to acknowledge that our vices or insecurities can imprison and devour us.

The logical conclusion of a sinful life, a life without order, is Satan. Found in the final canto at the centre of the earth, Dante’s Satan is a far cry from the energetic Satan of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Dante’s Satan is defined by his immobility and passivity. His three mouths gnaw endlessly, while his bat-like wings keep the pit of Hell frozen. At the furthest point from God, Satan is purely mechanical, bereft of all liberty. He is a gigantic air conditioner. The epitome of slavery, he is unable even to exercise God’s gift of speech. Dante and Virgil’s only interaction with him is to use his shaggy satyr legs as a ladder to exit Hell.

Most sinners are not so enslaved. Like most of us today, most are a mix of good and evil. Many of them may even know the good but fail to pursue it due to their weak will. They are placed in the upper circles of Hell, among the incontinent. Incontinence includes such sins as lust, gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, and sloth. Because the incontinent subordinate their judgment to their desires, because they subordinate what is higher in man to what is lower, they are not free.

More odious to God are sins of violence, punished in circle seven. The violent are like beasts, unable or unwilling to use reason. Like the incontinent, the violent let their desires dominate their judgment, but they are punished more severely because their sins are harmful to human community or nature. The suicides are some of the most visibly unfree sinners because their very inability to deal with the life they have been given leads them to annihilate their liberty entirely. Consequently, they are trees, which, unlike humans, are unable to end their existence. They can speak only when one of their branches has been broken, i.e. once someone inflicts the harm of which they are no longer capable. In Canto XIII, Dante encounters Pier della Vigna, an advisor to Emperor Frederick II. He is brought down by the other jealous courtiers who stoke the Emperor’s suspicions of him. Blinded and thrown into prison, the disgraced advisor cannot bear hearing his reputation destroyed outside his prison walls, so he smashes his head against the wall. Much as with the other suicides, his interest in himself is intense. “My mind, in scornful temper, / hoping by dying to escape from scorn, / made me, though just, against myself unjust.” Pier della Vigna’s twisted syntax reflects his convoluted self-justification. (Read more.)