Dante At The Gates Of Dis

On The Power Of Image To Imprison Us -- And To Set Us Free

Eric Armusik, a Catholic artist in Pennsylvania, is painting his way through Dante’s Inferno. Take a look here at how far he’s gotten — truly some arresting images. Above is his vision of the events in Canto 9, when Virgil has to shield Dante’s eyes from the Erinyes. You might glance at this and think that Virgil is just being prudish, shielding Dante from topless women, but in fact this Canto is a profound meditation on the power of the image to seduce.

In my book How Dante Can Save Your Life, I write about it like this. Some background: the book is about how I went back to my Louisiana hometown to live after my sister died, and was shocked to discover that my mom and dad, and my late sister’s kids, rejected us as “city people.” I fell chronically ill with stress-induced Epstein-Barr. God used a combination of therapy, prayer, and reading the Divine Comedy to heal me. I write about that journey in How Dante Can Save Your Life, which is about how this great poem leads the attentive reader on a journey through his own heart, and eventually to God.

You need to know before you read this passage that “the bouillabaisse story” is about how, in 1998, my Louisiana family allowed us newlyweds, home from New York for the holidays, to prepare a bouillabaisse for them — we had asked if we could, and brought special ingredients from New York to do it. We spent all day working on it, and when we served it that evening, no one would even taste it. My sister made a snide remark about country cooking. One irony: “bouillabaisse” is the French term for a fish stew that is much like what the Cajun French call “courtbouillion”; if I had told my family I was cooking courtbouillion, a French word they knew, they would have eaten it happily.

But this wasn’t about the food. This was about what the food symbolized. They had allowed us to go to all that trouble, just to put us in our place by refusing the gift that they had welcomed in principle. This story turned out to be the template for my relationship with them all, and a prelude to the rejection of the gift of ourselves. It was a rejection that destroyed my health for a while, and, though this isn’t in the book, led directly to the destruction of my marriage.

In this passage from How Dante, based on Canto 9 (illustrated above), I talk about how we underestimate the power of image to wreck us. My own Medusas were memories of hurt and humiliation, like the bouillabaisse moment, that rendered me paralyzed in sickness and depression. From the book:

The malign power of the image is the next challenge Dante and Virgil face in Inferno. They approach the city of Dis, a citadel protected by walls of iron glowing red from the heat of the Inferno. Till now, the sins Dante and Virgil have faced are connected with the appetite. The iron walls of Dis symbolize that beyond this point, the sins punished are those having to do with a hardened will.

The demons guarding Dis will not grant them entrance. Virgil’s powers fail him for the first time on the journey. The pilgrim turns white with fear, but anxious Virgil bucks him up by telling him God has promised to send help.

Suddenly “three hideous women” appear, warning the two travelers to leave, or else they will summon Medusa, the monster from Greek mythology, whose gaze turns all those who meet it to stone.

“Turn your back and keep your eyes shut,” Virgil orders. He is so afraid for Dante that he puts his own hands over the pilgrim’s eyes to protect him.

The meaning of this dramatic moment has to do with the limitations of both intellect and the power of reason. Here at the gates of Dis, Virgil, sometimes considered the embodiment of reason, is up against a force too great for his considerable powers.

Only divine assistance can save them now.

This Medusa moment has roots in Dante’s youth. Earlier in his life, the poet wrote a series of dazzling poems about the donna pietra, or stone lady. She was a heartless woman who would not return his obsessive love, thereby leaving his will powerless before her image. Here in Inferno, the pilgrim Dante faces a legendary woman with the power to freeze him in place with a single stare. And reason cannot help him conquer her.

We often underestimate our own weakness in the face of compelling images. In his Confessions, the fifth-century saint Augustine of Hippo wrote about his young friend Alypius, a Roman law student of strong moral convictions. His friends invited him to go to the gladiatorial games at the Colosseum, and after first refusing, Alypius agreed, saying that he would keep his eyes closed during the gory parts.

At the games, a roar from the crowd was too much to resist. Certain that he could handle what he saw without losing control over his will Alypius uncovered his eyes. It was a terrible mistake. Augustine writes:

He fell more dreadfully than the other man whose fall had evoked the shouting; for by entering his ears and persuading his eyes to open the noise effected a breach through which his mind—a mind rash rather than strong, all the weaker for presuming to trust in itself rather than in [God], as it should have done—was struck and brought down. As he saw the blood he gulped the brutality along with it; he did not turn away but fixed his gaze there and drank in the frenzy, not aware of what he was doing.

[St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding]

There’s an old-fashioned Catholic phrase, “custody of the eyes,” that refers to one’s obligation to be careful what one allows oneself to see. It’s a quaint-sounding concept today, but a surprisingly useful one.

One of the best things my wife ever did for me was to challenge me early in our marriage about my habit of watching Jerry Springer and other trash-TV shows. I got a big kick out of laughing at the dolts and mouth breathers confessing their sleazy sins on TV and getting into fistfights. I was watching it ironically, or at least that’s what I told myself.

Julie wasn’t having it. “You don’t want to be that guy,” she said. “You don’t want to be the guy who takes pleasure in watching people degrade themselves and behave like animals.”

Actually, I didn’t mind being that guy at all. It was fun. But my wife showed me that I was training my conscience to find amusement in things that ought to horrify me, or at least move me to pity and compassion for people who degrade themselves publicly.

… In a much more serious vein than slumming with Jerry Springer, I fell victim to my own hubris in reporting on the Catholic sex abuse scandals. In 2001, when I first began to write about the scandal as a New York Post columnist, I interviewed Father Tom Doyle, a courageous Catholic priest who destroyed his own clerical career to take a stand for abuse victims. When I told Father Doyle that I was a Catholic who was serious about my faith, he warned me to be very careful going forward.

“If you go down this path,” he said, “you will go to places darker than you can imagine.”

He knew; he had been there. I took the priest’s warning with care, but felt that it would be cowardice to turn back. These were terrible crimes committed by priests of my own church against innocent children—and the bishops were accomplices. I had the courage of Alypius, confident that I could see anything and not have my moral resolve shaken.

I was wrong. The evil I examined as a journalist—in reading court testimony, accounts of abuse survivors, and once-secret church documents detailing sexual attacks on children, and in personal interviews with families of victims—destroyed my ability to believe in the Roman Catholic faith, and almost did the same to my capacity to believe in Christianity at all.

I did not seek out the scandal details for the sake of curiosity. I sought them out to do good, to help the helpless. My motivations didn’t matter. What I saw turned my faith to stone—and there was nothing my reason could do about it.

If I had taken Father Doyle’s advice, I would have spent far more time strengthening myself in prayer as I carried out my investigations. This, I think, is what Dante would have advised. Some threats are so potent that only the grace of God can deliver us from them—and that’s what happens to Dante and Virgil.

The sudden appearance of an angel saves Virgil and Dante from the Furies and opens the gates of Dis for them. There are times when only an infusion of divine grace can give us the strength to overcome what we cannot conquer through our own power.

The showdown at the gates of Dis revealed to me my own personal Medusas: memories that rendered me helpless to act to free myself. Why was it that so many of my sessions with Mike [my therapist — RD] returned to the same family stories—the hunting trip, the bouillabaisse insult—and the same arguments, jibes, and rude gestures? And why did so many of my confessions with Father Matthew double back to those same stories?

My sins always emerged from anger at the unjust way I had been treated, and impotent rage at my inability to change my family’s minds or to overcome their power over my emotions. “The bouillabaisse story is the template for my relationship with my family”—if I told Mike and Father Matthew that once, I told them a hundred times.

And it was true! But it had turned from an icon disclosing the emotional and psychological dynamics within the family system into a monster whose gaze I could not turn away from, and who turned my legs to stone.

“You think you can’t move,” Mike told me, “but those memories only have the power over you that you allow.”

“Do you think I want to hang on to them?” I said. “They’re making me sick as a dog, and miserable. If I knew how to let them go, I would. It’s not so much that those memories stick around, but that they explain so perfectly everything that has happened since I came back. One way or another, the bouillabaisse story happens every few days.”

“I get that,” Mike said. “I’m not denying that what you’re going through is real. What I’m saying is that you need to decide what you believe about memories. They aren’t who you are. They aren’t who you have to be. Even if things like this keep happening, and they likely will, you have to decide how much you will internalize them.”

I could see his reasoning, but I still did not know how to break the spell. I wanted a quick fix, a eureka moment that sorted everything out and set me aright. This was unrealistic.

It was. To be free, to live at liberty from the power of the spell, required a lot of struggle. But it can be done! How Dante Can Save Your Life can be thought of as literary self-help, in a way. You don’t have to have read Dante to be able to read and learn from my book, but you will almost certainly get to the end of it, especially the deathbed scene with my father, and the graces God poured out on me there, without wanting to read the Commedia as soon as you can.

Poetry, like any form of true beauty, can heal, because it can serve as a vessel for God’s grace. I revisit the topic in Living In Wonder (pre-order here for Oct 22 delivery). Excerpts:

We pay attention to what we desire—but we have to learn to desire the right things. Enchantment—the restoration of flow among God, the natural world, and us—begins with desiring God, and all his manifestations, or theophanies, in our lives. As Orthodox theologian Timothy Patitsas puts it, “The healing of the soul begins with noticing God’s many theophanies and falling in love with them. In other words, it begins with eros for beauty.”

More:

“Beauty will save the world.” You see that line a lot—it’s by the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky—but few people seem to know what it means. It sounds hippie-ish, frankly. But Dostoyevsky was no hippie. He had suffered immensely in his life. Another Russian who suffered, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, pondered the meaning of Dostoyevsky’s enigmatic phrase, which seemed naive to him at first. Sure, beauty can raise your flagging spirits, but whom has beauty saved?

But then Solzhenitsyn grasped that true beauty is “completely irrefutable, and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender.” How, then, will beauty save the world? By piercing the hard hearts and closed minds of men with the truth that delivers them from despair and calls them out of themselves.

Another great Russian, Andrei Tarkovsky, also recognized a heroic spiritual role for beauty. Americans like to think of beauty as decoration, but Tarkovsky knew better. “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example,” he said. “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.”

We are not going to argue ourselves back to enchantment, nor are we going to behave ourselves into true goodness. We need reason, and we need morality. But, above all, we need beauty.

This is the message of Dante’s three-volume poem The Divine Comedy, or Commedia. It is not only one of the greatest works of art ever made but also a sure guide to Christian re-enchantment—indeed, to repentance, conversion, and salvation itself—through beauty.

The poet wrote from a place of radical loss. He had been on top of the world in Florence, his native city, until political strife led to his permanent exile. He spent the rest of his days trying to make sense of what went wrong and how to make it right. The result was the Commedia, the story of how a man named Dante who is lost in the “dark wood” found his way out to restoration and ultimately back to God.

The poem is theologically and philosophically dense, but it isn’t theology or philosophy that draws the pilgrim Dante to God. It is the encounter with beauty—the beauty of Beatrice, the woman the poet loved in real life, who died young. In the poem, God sends Beatrice from heaven to lead the lost Dante to salvation, knowing that it is only the light of her beloved face that can penetrate his gloom. Making the way for Beatrice’s appearance in Dante’s life is Virgil, the classical poet, whose goodness was the bait that first drew the lost and broken poet out of the forest of his despair.

In the Commedia, the pilgrim Dante undertakes a perilous voyage through the afterlife—down to the Inferno (hell), up the mountain of Purgatorio (purgatory), and finally through the realm of Paradiso (heaven)—until he encounters God himself. It is a voyage first of repentance, then of purification.

In his study on the figure of Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Charles Williams explains how she is the greatest figure in literature, revealing the “way of affirmation”—the path to unity with God through the recognition and celebration of the goodness in the world. In Dante’s poem, Beatrice is the bearer of God’s light. Through contemplating her beautiful image, the lost and broken poet learns to see through her to the everlasting God, who has saved her and desires to save Dante.

“The sight of Beatrice . . . filled him with the fire of charity and clothed him with humility,” wrote Williams, who was part of Lewis’s and Tolkien’s circle. “She is such that whoever stays to behold her becomes a noble thing or dies.”

For pilgrim Dante, her beauty is so powerful that it compels him to want to change his life, to become more virtuous. She is the bearer of charisma, of a spiritual gift conferred by Christ—and, as such, Dante wants to imitate her. He can withstand the intensity of her true smile only after he has become purified of his sinfulness and more filled with the strengthening light of Christ.

Remember that for Dante the poet, and all medieval Christians, the entire universe was enchanted, imbued with meaning and the presence of God. Our sinfulness and selfishness blinds us to the divine light within. If God’s light shines stronger in some places than in others, says Dante, that’s because some are more receptive of grace. Desire for beauty and truth, and for God, their source, pulls us along the path of conversion and theosis.

In canto 18 of Paradiso, the third book of the Commedia, Beatrice accompanies Dante on the stage of his journey that takes him through heaven:

I turned to my right side to see if I

might see if Beatrice had signified

by word or gesture what I was to do

and saw such purity within her eyes,

such joy, that her appearance now surpassed

its guise at other times, even the last.

And as, by feeling greater joyousness

in doing good, a man becomes aware

that day by day his virtue is advancing,

so I became aware that my revolving

with heaven had increased its arc—by seeing

that miracle becoming still more brilliant.

—Paradiso 18:58–63

The more Dante contemplates her beauty and goodness, the greater his ability to see her true worth and, in turn, the greater his own spiritual advance. Regeneration is not something that happens in a single stroke; it’s a process. As Dante becomes purer in heart, his ability to perceive God’s glory in creation grows, as does his love for God and his desire to be united with him. Beatrice cautions him to be patient, because achieving blessedness (or, you might say, holy enchantment) is a process of dying to self to make room for more of God’s grace. As we diminish, he advances within us.

It’s true. Images can imprison us, and images can set us free. That’s because images with spiritual and psychological power lead us beyond their surface appearance, to deeper realities mediated through them. The more you gaze upon vice, the more you desire vice, and the more vicious your soul becomes. The more you gaze upon beauty, the more you desire beauty, and the more beautiful your soul becomes.

I lived this truth myself, and wrote about it in my Dante book, which remains my favorite of all my books. If you haven’t read it, I hope you will give it a try, and not be intimidated by not having read Dante. As I explain in the book, I “met” Dante in a bookstore in Baton Rouge, in the 46th summer of my life, sick as a dog and lost in my own dark wood. I saw the Commedia on a high shelf in the poetry section, and thought that I wish I had read it in college, but was sure that today I wouldn’t know how to make sense of it. For some reason, though, I took it down anyway, and read the first canto. I knew that God had sent me a message in a bottle. You really can read Dante, if you get the right translation, with good notes. And if you read it slowly, and prayerfully, the poem will reveal things about yourself, and about life, that had been hidden for years. I’m telling you, this art is powerful and transformative.

Canto 1, ‘In The Dark Wood’, by Eric Armusik

(I would also love to direct you to Timothy Patitsas’s great and thick volume, The Ethics Of Beauty, about which I write in Living In Wonder. If my new book serves only as a gateway to Patitsas, Iain McGilchrist, Matthew Crawford, and others who are smarter and deeper than me, then it will have achieved an important goal.)

By the way, Regan Arts, the Dante book publisher, came out with a new edition of How Dante Can Save Your Life not long ago. If you haven’t read it yet, I think you, as a subscriber to this newsletter, will get a lot out of it. Most of us live in a dark wood in some ways. The good news is that we don’t have to stay there. In the Divine Comedy, God sends Virgil to show Dante the way out. In my life, He sent Dante. I never imagined that such riches of the intellect, of drama, and of grace, were in that late medieval poem. But they are! And they can be yours! All you have to do is ask.

cover of the new edition