Dante: Poet of the Earthly World

Dante Between Purgatory's Mountain and the City of Florence

Detail from Domenico di Michelino, Dante and his Work

Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence 1465

(Image from Wikipedia)

One of my online friends, Sperwer, who has been in Korea for some time, knows the Korean language, understands a lot about this country, has his own blog (Sperwer's Log), and frequently writes on things Korean, also has his other interests, one of these being martial arts, another of these being ... Dante.

Or so I assume, for Sperwer has sent me an article on Erich Auerbach titled "Dante: The Supreme Realist," written by Michael Dirda for the New York Review of Books (Volume 54, Number 1, January 11, 2007).

Sperwer knows my fascination with Milton's Paradise Lost and has probably noticed that I've sometimes cited parallels to Dante's Divine Comedy, which Milton hoped to surpass but without which Milton's own achievement would have been unthinkable.

Yet, even Dante's achievement -- according to Dirda, commenting on Auerbach's views -- would have been impossible without Christ:

For Auerbach, though, Christ stands as a turning point in artistic as well as religious history. While the ancient philosophical ideal of ataraxia -- the state of serene calm -- counsels a stoic indifference to life's vicissitudes, Christianity asks each of us to engage intensely with this world. Just as God's son had subjected himself to an earthly destiny and was willing to submit to creaturely suffering, so our own lives, our own "wrestling with evil," have now become "the foundation of God's judgment to come." Our consciousness of sin further encourages focused attention on our unique selves and our specific vices and virtues. The Christian world, consequently, throngs with distinct souls, each finding or losing its way to God. This revolution accounts for the sheer diversity of the characters and personalities shown in the Commedia.

This is a fascinating argument, that Christ's incarnated, earthly life justified each Christian's intense, individual engagement with the world and thus accounts for the diversity of individuals in Christendom and thereby the concrete, embodied, diverse individuals whom we encounter in Dante's Commedia.

Sometime, I'll have to actually read Auerbach's Mimesis (along with his Dante) and bring it to terms with Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age and Brague's Eccentric Culture, all three (or four) of which -- so it seems -- engage in world-historical efforts toward understanding Western civilization, and thereby prove themselves quintessentially Western.

Will the Western civilization that made such literature as Dante's possible persist?

Hegel famously maintained that the owl of Minerva flys at dusk, that we gain wisdom at the turning of an era, and Auerbach -- according to Dirda -- sensed a turning:

[I]t is hard to overlook the elegiac tone in so much of ... [Auerbach's] scholarship, inevitably a reflection of the century's dark middle decades. When he wrote Dante: Poet of the Secular World in 1929, Auerbach recorded something of what European civilization had accomplished just before the barbarians overwhelmed the city of man and God. In still later years, this great humanist grew increasingly convinced, as he wrote in the preface to Literary Language and Its Public, that "European civilization is approaching the term of its existence; its history as a distinct entity would seem to be at an end."

Dirda remarks, "That seems, for good or ill, more true than ever."

I wonder what, precisely, Dirda means. That Europe's "history as a distinct entity" is "at an end" because the whole world is becoming Westernized, or because a world civilization is emerging, or because Europe is literally dying away as its native birth rate falls below sustainability?

That third possibility is the most worrisome...