Even today it is not uncommon to come across comments such as this: after a thousand years of dark ages Europe recovered its Greco-Roman patrimony with the advent of the Renaissance. Such a cavalier wide-brush designation, besides revealing much ignorance on a crucial and important period of European history, usually hides a blatant blind bias against the Catholic Church by those pseudo-scholars who would like to make the case that Christianity was the direct cause of the alleged “retrogression” in civilization.

Were I asked to choose one medieval man and one timeless poem that would disprove such a misguided theory I would settle on Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante belongs to that period of history which precedes the Renaissance but is no less crucial for the rebirth of antiquity and its synthesis with Christianity: Humanism. 

The Divine Comedy’s timelessness has to do with Dante's uncanny ability to present in epic scope a total universe far vaster than anything explored by our space shuttles: a transcendent spiritual universe. One of the great ironies in the history of modern science since the Renaissance has to do with technological progress paralleled by the loss of a coherent theological cosmology.

While Dante would applaud the achievements of modern space explorations, for instance, he would not mistake its conquest for a higher theological reality. He would insist that any kind of flight in space is merely reflective of an invisible flight of the imagination by which we comprehend God's hidden theological universe. And it is this canopy of being that gives physical form to the sky in which the shuttle flies. Indeed, it may take a tragedy like the "'Challenger Seven" explosion to remind us of Dante's terrifying, mysterious, yet providential cosmology. And when President Reagan, in his eulogy to the heroic crew of the ill-fated space ship, stated that "they had a new home beyond the stars" and "they had touched the face of God," he made allusion to the spiritual universe that would be familiar to Dante who explores it in epic proportion, an expedition that would later lead us to append the name "divine" to that incredible journey to God. It is that journey  guided by Providence which seems to be mankind’s ultimate destiny and which ends well and makes us exclaim that “all is well that ends well” that merits the designation “comedy” for the epic poem, as distinguished from a tragedy or a catastrophe.

What separates Dante's epics from others in the genre of the ancient, medieval, and modern eras is that entire work takes place in another order of existence out of time and history. The setting of the poem is eternity and Dante himself remarks that his subject is the "state of souls after death." Whereas most other epics have episodes where the hero visits eternal realms of being, such as Odysseus's visit to the underworld in the Odyssey, the eternal dimensions remain a background action in most epics. Dante remarkably reverses the process. Eternity is the literal subject of the poem and Dante's cosmic imagination enables him to imagine various episodes of history from a timeless mode of being. The poem presents a dramatic rendition of how God views the history of man and how He/She knows the world to be. Therein lies the key to a comedy that is divine. Its point of view has to do with Gods's understanding of the order of many varieties of existence of which the order of time and history are merely one.

Dante's achievement revolutionizes the capacities for epic action and narrative. Dante is the greatest fantasy writer of all time. He discovers eternity as the central subject of an epic. This feat of genius reinvigorated enduring speculation about other modes of transcendent being rooted in Plato's natural theology and its utilization in the Gospels of the Bible and the Epistles of St. Paul. Dante is the vital medieval figure who concentrates Hellenic doctrines of transcendence and the Biblical vision of eternity. He shows the relevance of the legacy for subsequent eras. His influence is incalculable for the modern world: without Dante there would be no "Twilight Zone," no “Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and certainly no "ET." All these actions inevitably find their way back to Dante who pioneered the art of a story rooted in eternity intersecting history.

The fact that "ET" is one of the most popular movies of all time is evidence of Dante's enduring achievement and contemporary relevance. When we delight in such movies, we most remember who Steven Spielberg's ultimate ancestor is. By the same token when we confront the increasing disordered images, ugliness, and dehumanization of our culture, we must recall that Dante is the preeminent architect of Satan's kingdom in the Inferno.

While we can rejoice in the enduring popularity of "ET," we must recognize that much of our modern and post-modern culture has identified itself with the sordid comedy of Dante's Hell; or distorted images and actions are officially promoted as worthy of serious audience attention. We have a rock group naming itself after the revolting polluted marsh of Dante's hell called "Styx" and we have other groups calling themselves "Judas Priest," "Black Sabbath," and "Megadeath."

Art awards, funded by taxpayers’ dollars, have been given to exhibits where religious icons are submerged in human filth. A film portraying Jesus as an indecisive weakling has been nominated for an Academy Award. At a modem art exhibit patrons have been invited to walk on an American flag. A Church teaching series, used in mainline denominations, portrays Christ as an ancient forerunner of Che Guevara and pictures Him leading proletarian, revolutionary mobs.

These are only a few examples of the vast suffusion in our time of what Dante would call demonic culture. Its presence as well its promotion is reflective of the massive disorder in which we live. Such conditions argue forcefully for an understanding of the sources and meaning of the sights, sounds, and images that confront us. The great difference between contemporary culture and that of Dante is that medieval culture could recognize hell as deformed and perverse, whereas contemporary culture increasingly equates hellish iconography with the normative and the chic.

The Divine Comedy teaches a culture how to be literate. The poem instructs the reader in comprehending how the symbols, icons, and images of his world form a providential economy. In this very magazine there has been a brief conversation on the thorny issue of the relationship of politics to art which, if memory serves, was initiated by one of its editors, Thanos Kalamidas and went on in its comment box while I was contributing a series of articles on aesthetics which I was teaching at the time. Perhaps it ought to be revisited, for the challenge is still there. There is indeed an ambiguous existential nexus between politics and art.

Let us for the moment focus on some insightful distinction between symbiotic and parasitic works and how they work on Dante. There is no doubt that the supreme poet immortalized himself by writing an epic that has become timeless. Nobody but a few scholars would remember him for De Monarchia, his treatise on a united Europe, nor for his sonnets and his “rime pietrose.” The Commedia however, is, and it will continue to be taught, in all the best universities in the world.

What powerfully motivated the writing of the epic were complex political events having to do with the ecclesiastical and secular powers of the times causing Dante’s painful exile from Florence. The characters in the three other-worldly realms visited by Dante in his imagination are real political people who lived in Florence at the time and affected Dante’s life. Paradoxically, they too have been immortalized by Dante’s opus. There the relationship is clearly parasitic: ignoble and obscure political people who lived in Florence in the 14th century will be remembered for many centuries. That is similar to the relationship of Socrates to his accusers. We know their names today because of Socrates and Plato. But this begs the question: what did Dante write about that made him immortal? As mentioned above the poem's timelessness has to do with Dante's ability to present a total spiritual universe.

One of the great ironies in the history of modern science since the Renaissance has to do with an almost magical technological progress paralleled by the increasing loss of a coherent spiritual universe. We are at a point that the word soul which the ancient Greeks well understood and wrote treatises about (see Aristotle’s “On the Soul”)  now conjure up the sole of one’s shoes. Dante would never mistake the achievements of modern space explorations with higher spiritual realities. He would insist that any kind of flight in space is merely reflective of an invisible flight of the imagination by which we comprehend God's hidden spiritual universe. He would never repeat the incredible banality and superficiality of the Soviet astronaut who returned to earth and declared that he had not seen the face of God in space.

The setting of the poem is eternity and Dante himself remarks that his subject is the "state of souls after death." To repeat, the fact that "ET" is one of the most popular movies of all time is evidence of Dante's enduring achievement and contemporary relevance. The same could be said for Silone’s and Kazantzakis’ novels. They are narrated presenting real people in real political historical situations but their background is the eternal; a timeless mode of being outside of time and space. And by that, Dante did not mean red men with a tail and horns or people with wings playing the harp on a cloud as the modern political activist agreeing with Mao’s characterization of religion as poison for the people, or the caricaturist of religion are apt to suggest.

So my perplexity is this. While accepting the distinction between parasitic and symbiotic relationship between art and politics, is there not another relationship which modern man since Voltaire (Dante’s mimesis) has all but forgotten and yet remain vital to preserve out very humanity? I mean the nexus between the eternal and the temporal. Is modern man still capable of imagining such a relationship; and if he is, does he conceive of it as symbiotic or parasitic? Could it be that consciously, or perhaps unconsciously, modern man continues to read and study Dante, a medieval man of 800 years ago, because he has a secret longing for a return to that lost nexus, that garden of Eden from which he has been expelled and for which he longs, and to which Dante can lead him? As I said, ruminations, put perhaps appropriate to the season we are in and leading to a viable dialogue with those men of good will who long for a better world than the sad one we happen to be living in.