Time spent among people reveals just how difficult it is, even for the most worthy and competent, to be capable of real love and relationship. Developing this capacity is in truth the sole bifocal commandment of the Christian religion, all others being mere ancillae; and it is also the goal of Jung’s school of psychoanalysis, which posited the increased capacity for relationship as one of the sure indicators of maturation. These two strands meet in Helen Luke’s book Dark Wood To White Rose, in which the great psychoanalyst offers her commentary on the greatest Christian work of art, Dante’s Commedia.
The Comedy is too difficult and too vast to be well understood, and explorers of its depths have always sought the help of sybils. Luke is one of the very best. Her technique, as unique as it is valuable, is to refer Dante’s vision back to the place from which it must have arisen, personal experience coupled with the human capacity to form images, such as we find nightly in our dreams. That this must be the source of the Comedy explains some of its durability. Not many people believe that our existence after death will be much the way Dante describes it; and the poem’s intellectual coherence depends to some extent on scientific theories like the geocentric universe which are quite disproven. And yet this has not made Dante’s work irrelevant, as the scientific calculations of epicycles required by the Ptolemaic system are. Why is this? Dante was a living man, and his imagery derives from human life as he experienced it. It does not take any theology to see that many men and women, in this life, are in hell; and others in paradise, and others on the way; and for many of them the reasons why are not far different from the reasons Dante offers. There is no need for Judgement Day for such a contrapasso to transpire; it seems to happen as a law of our psychic nature; and illuminating this nature is the goal of Luke’s commentary.
One of the first things Luke is able to dislodge from the mind of the reader is the notion that Dante is describing a mere system of ethics. This notion is partially the result of the fact that many only read the Inferno (about which Luke writes only 43 pages!), where they see damned lovers, damned homosexuals, damned heroes, damned popes, indeed almost every category of person, but all damned. But they do not see that Dante specifically notes the presence of homosexuals in Purgatory, having their sin of lust purged along with everyone else. And what do we do with women like Cunizza in Paradiso?
She had been the mistress of the troubadour poet Sordello, running away from her first husband. Tracked down by her brother, she again escaped with a knight and traveled, unmarried, about Italy with him. After his death she married again three times. (143)
Here is Luke’s interpretation:
Cunizza had been overmastered by desire in the same way as Francesca in the first circle of the Inferno, and both of them have entered the eternal wheeling motion which is a symbol of desire on all levels. In other words, they experience the same things, but for one it is Heaven and for the other Hell. Nowhere in the poem is it more clearly seen that Heaven and Hell are not places but states of consciousness, with the clear implication that, as Jung so often said, the choice between them lies in the individual’s conscious standpoint and willingness to confront his egocentricity. Francesca’s desire remained centered on Paolo as a mere projection of her own inner longing; and she circles aimlessly, forever bound to his image. Cunizza, we may be sure, through long years of struggle and suffering had won through to the reality of relationship and compassion, and all her wandering desires had become one in the wheeling dance around the center which is Love itself. (144)
Near Cunizza in Paradiso is Rahab, the harlot of Jericho,
who risked her life to save the spies of Joshua. Nothing could be plainer than this. She gave her body to many men but would have given her life for that of another in danger. Thus the harlot is in heaven; it is not the conventions but the quality of her love, the state of our innermost morality which determines our heaven or our hell. (144)
The same truth can be found by examining the associates of Christ himself, and by looking at the people in our own lives, where we often find that those who have made mistakes can become like the Prodigal Son, who partakes of the feast of his father, while his more punctilious brother is so wrapped up in his self-serving dutifulness nothing is left but resentment.
Indeed, sin is as mysterious in the Comedy as it is in life, a mixture of good and evil which is in some sense unavoidable and intrinsic to God’s will. After Dante has gone through the purgation of Purgatory, and been bathed in the river Lethe, he then drinks of the river Eunoe, an otherwise unknown mythological stream perhaps invented by Dante. Curiously, this river restores the memory of all past sins, but now they are seen from God’s perspective, as the Exultet proclaims on the Easter Vigil:
When we drink of this stream, sin will no longer be forgotten but forgiven – that is, will be fully remembered not as shameful and destructive but as a felix culpa, the experience of darkness essential to wholeness: “O happy fault that wert the occasion of so great a redemption.” (99)
Throughout Paradiso, it is made clear that we bring our failings with us to God. Heaven consists of the imperfect – the first circle those who have failed in their vows, the second circle those whose egotism has stained their exercise of power, the third circle those whose love has trangressed proper boundaries, and so on. In this way God populates the entire universe, and every level of being is occupied by some form of existence. I am reminded of a type of red algae that lives in the snow of Antarctica, eating nothing and eaten by nothing, part of no food chain, but simply existing there: so every sort of creature has some place in the whole. One thing though is purged away and lost, the restless egotism of individual members: Luke notes that Dante is amazed in the first circle of heaven, that the people there do not have a desire to be higher. When we read this, we realize man’s immense egotism, who in heaven would be happy with nothing less than a four-decker bunkbed with the Holy Trinity. Part of the reply Dante receives, however, is that we all do receive such a thing, and the tiering of heaven is a concession to the limited nature of Dante’s temporal primate mind.
Luke notes a small version of Dante’s felix culpa theology, in noting that the very beginning of the poem (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura”) the word per, usually translated “in,” does not merely mean “in” (the word for which in Italian is in), but means “through.”
It is precisely through the terrifying experience of the dark wood that we find the way of return to innocence; that indeed it is because of his lost state that a man is able consciously to refind himself. (5)
See also Luke’s interpretation of Eden:
Dante’s Earthly Paradise is empty of human beings, for no man dwells there since Adam and Eve ‘fell’ into the quest for consciousness. For those who make the return it is now merely a place of passage – a gateway to the stars. For the conscious return takes us far beyond the state of natural innocence. (98)
The agency of sin in bringing us to recognize a power greater than ourselves – which is also why symbolically Dante must go through Hell in order to ascend to Heaven – is indeed part of the primary teaching of Christianity, the Paschal Mystery, the personal experience of death before resurrection.
The “refinding of oneself” is also indicated by Dante’s multiple double-uses of imagery. Luke is quite vigilant in pointing these out, and noting that our relationship to these phenomena is what changes, not the phenomena themselves:
All through these cantos Dante refers to Eden not as a garden, as one might expect, but a forest. Inevitably we remember, and are surely meant to remember, the dark and threatening wood in which Dante had been lost. There is, we sense, only one wood. Split off from our true identity, stumbling about in the fogs of pride and desire, the innocent forest of the unconscious is dark and destructive to us, and its paths lead down to despair… Thus it is with all the archetypes – with all the life of nature for that matter – nature outside or within is innocent both in its dark and its light aspects. It is the attitude, the degree of wholeness in each human being which determines the impact on him. (97)
At times her analysis is able to explain why certain passages have such an effect on us. After reading through the Inferno I am always astonished at the last canto, where Dante and Vergil climb on Satan’s body past the earth’s center of gravity and up to the surface again, where they see the night stars. Here is Luke’s analysis:
The effect upon us of this image is far more powerful than if the poets emerged from the dark pit into clear sunlight, for implicit in it is the whole meaning of this crucial transition-point in the life of a man or woman. We do not suddenly change our thralldom to the unconscious fogs and the sufferings of neurosis for a wholly conscious and sunlit climb to the heights. What we do experience at this moment is a total transformation of the nature of the darkness itself – or rather of our attitude towards it. As long as we seek to escape from our various “hells” into freedom from pain, we remain irremediably bound; we can emerge from the pains of Hell in one way only – by accepting another kind of suffering, the suffering which is purging, instead of meaningless damnation. (49)
As is so often the case with Helen Luke’s writing, I can think of moments of extreme crisis in my life when the experience was precisely as she describes; when the nature of the darkness was transformed by a recognition and acceptance of it, and I found myself with a long journey before me, but one which I found I had the strength to attempt.
Analysis leans heavily on a “collective unconscious” in order to interpret personally created symbols, but one of its tenets is that each individual has his own path to “individuation,” and his own experience of the numinous. Perhaps no literary work in history exemplifies this more than the Commedia; Dante is in fact astonishingly bold in asserting his own unique experience of the divine. When he enters the sphere of the fixed stars, he enters them in Gemini, “his birth sign of the zodiac. In other words, he has come to the root of his own individual nature under God” (169).
Nowhere is this more in evidence than in his treatment of Beatrice, who is hardly what we would call a “world-historical figure,” yet Dante makes her the bosom-companion of people like Solomon or the mother of Jesus or St. Peter or Trajan. In fact, at the top of Purgatory, there is a “procession of the Sacrament,” and on the tensa which is supposed to bear the image of the god is – Beatrice herself, instar Christi. To make it absolutely clear to his readers that he is consciously doing this, Beatrice is received to the song, “Benedictus qui venis,” changing the hymn to the second person but retaining the masculine adjective – to refer to Christ – unchanged. This is in fact orthodox Catholic theology, that the believers are members of the Body of Christ, and that the love for spouses is like that of Church and Christ (one of the reasons why the Comedy has never been on the Index of banned books), but this is certainly one of the arcaniora of the faith. It is quite nearly scandalous, and brings Christian theology to a truer and freer place. Luke’s comment:
The Sacrament of the altar is that image, that reality, which in you personally has awakened love and total devotion on every level of your being – body, soul, mind, and spirit. This is in truth the birth of Christ within and can lead you to the unity which is both center and circumference. Beatrice, standing on the car, both plays the part and is the Sacrament itself. (101)
Time and again Beatrice looks at God, and Dante looks at Beatrice, and gets his vision from the reflection in her eyes. This is what brings him ever closer to union with God. There could hardly be a bolder or more beautiful affirmation of the power of human love. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.”
Luke notes elsewhere the theological underpinnings which support this pattern. This is incarnational theology:
First he directs Dante to look upon The Lady herself. No one, man or woman, can see God unless he has first seen the Mother of God in her human form as Queen of Heaven; there can be no bypassing of the humanity through which God gives birth to Himself. (194)
Love of neighbor becomes the practice-commandment by which we can learn to love God. This is, in practical terms, almost certainly true. “Insofar as you have done unto the least of these, you have done unto me.”
This incarnational theology is what allows Dante to see the eternal in the things around him, seemingly populating the whole universe with Florentines. In Eden he meets a woman named Matilda, who has long puzzled commentators, as she matches the description of no known literary figure. Luke consents to the probable guess that she was merely a friend of Dante’s, probably one who knew Beatrice, and she plays in the poem (as presumably somehow in Dante’s life) the role of John the Baptist to Beatrice’s Christ, going before Beatrice and then immersing Dante in the water of Lethe.
Matilda’s function as a forerunner of Beatrice is here very plainly the same as St. John the Baptist’s as forerunner of Christ, but in her personal aspect she is about as different as can be imagined. Here is another unmistakable affirmation of the individual nature of our experience of the way. For Dante it was no dour ascetic who submerged him in the waters of his new baptism, washing away his sin. For every man the forerunner is unique, as the sacramental image is unique. (110)
Luke connects this concept with a key teaching of Jung’s:
So we may understand better Jung’s insistence that until a concept or a feeling or an attitude is personified – confronted in the image of a person, through projection or dream or imagination – no ‘taking thought’ can change the psyche. (99)
This is of course why Catholics celebrate the Mass, so that the ancient event can be recreated; and this is one of the truths which points to the necessity of the incarnating of the image of God in human life as well. Dante insists on this more than almost any other author; during the whole Comedy he is never without a guide. His ascent is made possible by holding continually before him the image of another who has already gone before him. The transformative power of images Dante understands well, as the pilgrims in Purgatory are on every terrace given images of excess and moderation to contemplate. “All transformation takes place in the presence of images,” is one of the dicta of Richard Rohr.
This is one of the spiritual truths which makes the facts of our own lives so important, and gives eternal value to the daily relationships we are part of. The lowest pit of hell is reserved for those who have betrayed not causes, but persons they loved.
In the image of Satan devouring the flesh of Judas and Brutus at the center of Hell, Dante, whether consciously or not, has thrust before our eyes with staggering force the truth that Satan, Evil itself, is fed and kept alive by the betrayal of conscious personal love between single individuals. The final treachery to God and the Universe is the setting up of a principle as of more moment than mature love. It is only when we become fully aware of the nature of this root of all the potential evil within us that we find ourselves climbing, by means of this same realization, up toward the light of truth. (44)
The fact that love ultimately directs us toward God is the central tenet of Dante’s theology, and Luke quotes with approbation Jung expressing similar thoughts (from his Memories, Dreams, Reflections):
Man can try to name love, showering upon it all the names at his command, and still he will involve himself in endless self-deceptions. If he possesses a grain of wisdom he will lay down his arms and name the unknown by the more unknown ignotum per ignotius – that is, by the name of God. That is a confession of his subjection, his imperfection, and his dependence; but at the same time a testimony to his freedom to choose between truth and error. (35)
Luke points out another form of this love in the extreme courtesy offered by all the saved to Vergil, who is never despised despite the fact that he is one of the damned. “He remains forever an essential part of the whole.” “Dante never devalues the lesser because it is incomplete and must finally be transcended.” This is one of the classic indicators of a higher level of consciousness – that it does not exclude the lower levels. In Paradiso, she notes Solomon’s powerful assertion of the resurrection of the body: “The spirit of man is not complete without the flesh. The infinite is not whole without the finite. There is ultimately one world, psychic and physical.” In fact, Luke goes further than that, saying, “this is the inner meaning of heresy – the adherence to one truth at the expense of, instead of in relation to, its opposite.” Elsewhere she calls it a “refusal of paradox.” It is a perennial danger – as Dante himself seems to note in the dream which Luke treats with greater depth and insight than perhaps any other commentator:
It is therefore no surprise that Dante, almost immediately after listening to the golden voice of Vergil discoursing on love, should fall asleep and have a very ugly dream about the voice of the Siren. We may imagine him growing drowsy in a glow of exaltation, uplifted by the beauty of Vergil’s words, feeling himself aware now of what love is; and then comes the comment from the unconscious, the balancing opposite, the warning that, if he is carried away into overevaluation of reason, he will be in acute danger of being possessed by the voice of the devouring anima promising all knowledge and all delight if he will give himself to her. (80-81)
The dream is one of the most surprising and disturbing moments in the whole poem, and it comes, as Luke indicates, in the midst of seeming prosperity; and it does seem to indicate the need to return to balance. Dante is being seduced by a siren; a woman then comes yelling at Vergil to tell him to warn Dante; Vergil exposes the siren’s belly, which produces so foul a stench that Dante wakes up.
What could more powerfully assert the equal value of human thought, feeling, and instinct, all three? A man has the power to unmask delusion through his clear thinking as long as, but only as long as, his eyes are fixed on the truth of feeling; moreover it is very clear that the woman alone would have been powerless and that neither would have broken the spell on the dreamer without the cooperation of his own instinct, his “nose” for the truth. “Wake up,” says the dream to Dante. “Wake up to the horror which would swallow you if you were to forget the mind of Beatrice.” Beatrice rejected becomes the “ancient witch” who promises man all knowledge and all pleasure without any of the suffering and hard work of learning relatedness and love. (84)
There are other passages where it seems Luke’s interpretation is the first satisfactory one ever offered. At the foot of the mountain of Purgatory the following happens. The souls of those who were overly busy in life, always fretting and acting and never resting in God, settle down for the night in a valley – God makes them wait for hundreds of years in place before they can begin the ascent – and two angels watch over them.
Then, while Dante is talking to one of the shades (all of whom, by the way, are still typically fussing about what is going on on the earth), he sees a great snake come into the valley, slithering over the green grass. At once the angels leap into the air on their shining green wings. As they move towards it with their blunt swords, the snake turns and is gone. This, it is explained, happens every evening. (67)
Luke notes that they are being forced to rest in the protection of another, and the great snake, who seems so vicious, can be turned aside by the slightest motion of God’s emissaries; and it is not necessary, indeed it is counter-productive, to always attempt to fight these demons oneself.
It is a true pleasure to watch the meeting of these two minds, Luke and Dante, both of whom clearly gave their lives to the pursuit of love, and both knew it to be a hard and difficult journey, which required great discernment, and knew that many people stop almost before they have begun. But what could be of greater importance than to develop this capacity for love and relationship? May it become the journey of us all. We leave off with John Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s own words of closing:
Here my powers rest from their high fantasy,
But already I could feel my being turned –
Instinct and intellect balanced equallyAs in a wheel whose motion nothing jars
By the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
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