dante, the mystical existentialist

Sahitya Akademi

DANTE, THE MYSTICAL EXISTENTIALISTAuthor(s): R.S. AHLUWALIASource: Indian Literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (January-March 1966), pp. 58-63Published by: Sahitya AkademiStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23330708 .

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DANTE, THE MYSTICAL

EXISTENTIALIST

R.S. AHLUWALIA

DANTE

needs no rehabilitation in the pantheon of

world poetry. He is already there since long and

in good company with Shakespeare and Goethe.

T.S. Eliot, himself a great modern poet and critic who did

more than any single writer in recent times to make the West

Dante-conscious, affirmed in 1944 that 'in the Divine Comedy, if anywhere, we find the classic in a modern European

language.' The global celebrations of the seventh centenary

of Dante's birth last year, apart from formally registering the

Italian poet's international status, has put him right in the

vortex of contemporary literary discussion and aroused

considerable curiosity and interest in his works and personality even in the Orient—to which he makes a passing reference

in Canto XI of his 'Paradiso' as a land of the 'Gange'

(meaning Ganges) from where the sun rises. So, in the

context of the recent upsurge of enthusiasm for him, the

question—'How does he savour in the original?'—acquires

more than a topical significance. The answer, however, cannot be easy. To interpret

this highly complex personality and encyclopaedic mind,

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DANTE, THE MYSTICAL EXISTENTIALIST

embracing the entire range of mediaeval culture from St.

Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas with Aristotle, Virgil, the Bible, St. Francis and the troubadours thrown in, may

be the despair even of the native Italian. By a supreme

effort of intuitive projection, backed by an innate sense of

history, he can perhaps jump seven centuries and re-live

what he so aptly calls Dante's 'ambiente' or the ethos of his

times. But even if a foreigner could manage, with some

measure of success, the necessary imaginative transposition

in the intellectual and political milieu of Dante's world, there would still be the question of communicating in another

language the incommunicable sonority and liquid melody of the Italian tongue, fashioned and employed as a literary

vehicle by one of the greatest poet-artists of the world. For,

the present writer considers the philosophical or theological import of Dante's work subservient to the sublime poetry of his Divine Comedy. By writing it he did not enunciate a new system of philosophy outside the Christian belief (he only interpreted it in a modern way), but he did redeem his promise made at the end of his earlier work Vita Nuova that he 'would write of his beloved Beatrice as has never

been written of any woman before.' It is perhaps the

finest example of the sensuous love of a woman transformed

into a mystic hymn of divine love.

And then, it will not suffice to put him in the right historical perspective. To convey, in clear and unambiguous

terms, the totality of the poet's response to the riddle of

existence would be a difficult task, as that response implies, in the words of T.S. Eliot, 'everything in the way of emotion,

between depravity's despair and the beatific vision, that man is capable of experiencing.' These difficulties and limitations in Dantean interpretation notwithstanding, one

may still deal with one particular aspect of his many-sided personality, which has some relevance to the modern exis

tentialistic thought and may appeal to the Indian mind not unfamiliar with the mystical tradition in poetry. It is

possible to speak of Dante as a mystical existentialist.

Mysticism, in our technological age, may be dismissed

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INDIAN LITERATURE

as bourgeois escapism and its juxtaposition with existentialism

may sound contradictory. Dante seems to reconcile in his

personality these two apparently antithetical attitudes of

philosophical thought. But then, are they really mutually

exclusive? Does the existentialist not share with the mystic

the quest of ultimate reality, the contempt for abstract ideas

or mechanical systems unrelated to individual experience,

and the untransferability of the essence of such an experience

making it imperative for both to work out their own salvation?

The need for salvation arises from an acute consciousness of

alienation, in one case from God, in another from self.

Alienation in either case leads to a crisis which is resolved in the case of the mystic by a conversion of the soul, and by a

decision of the will in the case of the existentialist. This

exactly is the curve described by the Divine Comedy in its

three-fold division into hell, purgatory and paradise. The

poem apparently is the story of a divinely conducted tour

al di la' or in the world beyond. But in reality, it traces the drama of Dante's own soul and that of every sensitive human

being who, at one time or other of his life's journey, becomes

painfully aware of the utter futility of what Shelley described as 'the painted veil which those who live call Life'. The

poem opens with Dante's confession of having strayed into

wrong:

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva scura

che la diritta via era smarrita

(Midway in the journey of this our life

I found myself in a gloomy wood, astray,

Having wandered from the path direct) The confession of wrong is followed by a feeling of

remorse and a cry for help, both conditions precedent for

a mystical experience and for deserving divine grace through

which salvation is to come ultimately. The divine grace in the case of Dante is represented by Beatrice who will be

his guide in paradise. But his guide in hell is Virgil, who

stands for reason and human will and that is how the mystic

formula is welded with the existentialist's. Dante's mysticism

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admits of the free individual choice of good or evil and is not entirely anti-reason. But once the commitment is made,

he would not stop at the resolution of the spiritual crisis

by an act of the will but would seek final redemption in the ultimate union of the individual soul with the universal.

This is essentially the mystic's solution for which Dante seems to have mental preference by training and education.

He had undergone very early in life a strictly austere religious education at the Franciscan convent of Santa Croce at

Florence and the entire mystic import of the Divine Comedy can be attributed to the influence of St. Francis, whom he pays a handsome tribute in the eleventh Canto of his 'Paradiso'.

Jacopone da Todi, another Fransciscan poet, provided Dante

with the fiery utterance of prophetic language which he

employed so effectively in his 'Inferno' to attack his arch

enemy, the living Pope Boniface VIII, that one is almost

ready to subscribe to the view that Dante put all his enemies

in hell and all his friends in heaven. Even in the imagery and symbolism employed in the

Divine Comedy Dante tends to approximate the mystic ideal.

For example, the mystical number three which Pythagoras called the number of God, controls not only the architectonics

of the poem but also its philosophical aspect. Architectoni

cally, the Comedy has three sections, each consisting of thirty three cantos, which again is a multiple of three. The entire

poem is written in 'terza rima', the three lines stanza. The

poet meets three beasts in the forest in which he got lost in

the very beginning of the poem ; the journey through hell

lasts three days. Then there are three types of sin, and

at the lowest circle of hell is Satan with his three mouths

chewing three traitors—Cassius, Brutus and Judas. Hell

has nine circles, purgatory nine partitions and paradise nine

heavens, each a multiple of the mystic number three. There

are three ladies to guard Dante's destiny—Maria, Santa

Lucia and Beatrice. All this tends to show dante as a mediaeval mystic

very much in the Christian tradition. But this hobnobbing with the mystical ideas and the stock-in-trade of the mystics

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INDIAN LITERATURE

does not necessarily mean that he was prepared to identify

himself with them or that he had solved his own spiritual problem on the basis of the humility, charity and the direct communion with the ultimate reality.

The ruling passion of his life was not piety but justice. Above his theological and philosophical theorizing, or an

allegorical representation of experience and the use of

symbolic language, there stands Dante with all his imper fections and nobility, with his pride and ruthless sense of

justice and dignity. Towards the end of his life he was

given a choice to return to his native city of Florence, but

since the offer contained some humiliating conditions he denounced it in these historic words: 'This then is the

gracious recall by which Dante Alighieri may be brought back to his native land, after enduring almost 15 years of exile!

This is the reward to an innocence known to all men! To

the sweat and labour of unceasing study! Can a man who is

anything of a philosopher stoop to such humiliation? Shall one who has preached justice and suffered injustice pay money

to those who have injured him, as though they had been his

benefactors? That, Father, is not the way to return to my

country. If any other way can be found—which may not

be derogatory to Dante's reputation and honour, I shall

not be slow to accept it. But if I cannot enter Florence in

such a way, then I will never enter Florence. What then?

Can I not everywhere gaze upon the mirror of the sun and the

stars ? Can I not everywhere under heaven express the most

precious truths, without first making myself inglorious, nay ignominious, in the sight of the city of Florence? I shall not ask for bread.' This surely is not the reply of a mystic but of a man who prized human dignity more than bread.

Luckily enough for humanity, Dante opted for the sun and the stars and directed the searchlight of his poetic genius to the innermost truth of his being. And it was thus that the Divine Comedy was born.

The scene of the Divine Comedy, though laid in the other

world, is peopled by Dante's contemporaries, or immediate or remote historical personages—Popes, prostitutes, prophets,

62




saints, traitors, adulterers and others, who actually belonged

to that age. Thus the foul air of 'Inferno' had after all a historical context. The subject matter of the poem is the fall

and redemption of man, but in the dialogues between Dante

and the characters he meets in hell, sin takes the back seat

and we hear the recounting of the lives of the sinners as lived

on the earth. We foreget, and almost forgive, the sin of

adultery in Francesca da Rimini while listening to her tender tale of the origin and development of the illicit love with Paolo which brought the lovers to hell. Even Dante, for a

moment, pauses to sympathise with the failing which human flesh is heir to. The humanist in him triumphs over the

mystic.

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dante, the mystical existentialist

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