So stay stuck there, for you are rightly punished,
And guard with care the money wrongly gained
That made you stand courageous against Charles
And were it not for the reverence I have
For those highest of all keys that you once held
In the happy life—if this did not restrain me,
I would use even harsher words than these,
For your avarice brings grief upon the world,
Crushing the good, exalting the depraved.
–Dante Alighieri, Inferno
Canto XIX, lines 97-105
tr. Mark Musa
Reading Dante in the 21st century is challenging for many reasons—we must negotiate multi-leveled allegory, update ourselves on Florentine politics—the Ghibelines vs. the Guelfs and resultant splinter groups, the Holy Roman Empire vs. Papal authority, 14th century Catholic liturgy, the evolution of Troubadour style. All of these aspects challenge the modern reader as we try to enter into the work sufficiently to empathize with the arduous spiritual journey of the narrator.
Yet, over the course of our current study of the Inferno, Dante has drawn me in—despite his sharply defined system of justice that is shaped by medieval Catholic values. He has drawn me in through his outrage at a corrupt leadership. In Dante’s time, Florence—and the greater tribe of what we now call Italy—was torn with local and empire-wide factional fighting. Dante found himself exiled from his beloved Florence as a result of shift in the party in control; the election went against Dante’s party and his return to Florence meant his death.
In the quote above, Dante the pilgrim addresses the feet topped with flame of Pope Nicholas III who is forced upside down into a hole in the rock of the 8th circle for his selling of church offices for his own benefit. Dante’s rage at the corruption of the highest church leader renders him inarticulate. This is one of the moments when the empathy sparks for me: there are moments when I am talking about Trump’s latest outrages when I literally have no words left for the grotesque absurdity of his candidacy.
Corrupt leadership is not simply destructive to the political system. The civic spirit in each citizen is denigrated when leaders behave badly. It is so tempting to turn cynical and disengage—to write off all the candidates as corrupt and lacking in dignity therefore not deserving of our support. In this way, the corrupt leader results in a flood of toxicity reaching across society. By gazing into the Hell of human corruption, we each have travelled to a kind of Hell—the worst parts of human greed are showcased and offered for public support. This makes one want to turn away in disgust from the realm of civic performance—sickened to the soul at the worst examples of human behavior. I found an echo to this urge in the following commentary on Dante’s Inferno:
“. . . In the moral-spiritual sense, there is another reason why the return from Hell is rare and difficult. It takes a special and resolute intelligence to experience the depths of a culture without being rocked by that revelation. Robert Frost, who certainly understood his own and his culture’s depths, called it a mind ‘too lofty and original to rage.’ Yet, one can understand the rage of those who go to the depths and do not return, who have had their minds turned and are lost forever. . .”
–Ricardo Quinones, “The Plot-line of Myth,” pp. 357-8 in Dante’s Inferno, The Indiana Critical Edition.
Many years ago during a late-night philosophical discussion in Berkeley, California, a dear friend stopped our wine-tinged ramblings with a simple question: “It comes down to this: do you think people are essentially good or essentially evil?”
My outrage at the public figures trading in on fear and prejudice is stoked by how these voices highlight the worst aspects of the human mind. I think Dante’s outrage—and the epic poem that resulted—shares a similar source. Dante wrote towards human salvation in terms he understood. He gazed into ‘the depths of (his) culture’ and refused to be rocked by that revelation. It is tempting to be lost forever—to witness the bombast and insanity of Trump and his ilk and draw one’s circle close against the world of degenerate souls. But Dante kept climbing—past Hell and the corrupt popes, he discovered penitent sinners and further along, those whose virtues matched their actions. Those are the voices we need to hear now—either through narrative art or in the public sphere. Instead of stoking my daily outrage at Trump’s behavior, I will keep turning to voices that discover and develop human goodness.
