it hurts resembles a magician's cabinet with a black box behind black curtains. On top of the box there is a grinder slowly grinding the hanging head of an axe that is fixed to the structure of the cabinet from the top with chains. This piece still hurts me.
6 Aralık 2009 Pazar
6 Kasım 2009 Cuma
Dynamism and the Movement in Renaissance
The nature of human individuality has been deeply investigated since the Greek Antiquity. The notion of character discussed in the ancient texts can be accepted as static until Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics introduced the character with a potential to change in order to reach perfection through effort. If one looks at the texts before Aristotle in that sense, it is possible to talk about ‘character’ in Homer’s Iliad only to a limited extent because gods held responsible from all the human actions. Parties in the Trojan War gained power or backed off according to the interference of gods to the war. These interferences put humans in a passive condition simply by claiming that they ‘were strengthened’ or ‘left weak’ by gods. Later on, the introduction of the ‘self’ with The Republic formed a philosophical ground for further investigation on human nature. Plato explained ‘character’ as static so to say that it is a sum of traits the human individual is endowed with from birth. According to Plato, gods could only be held responsible for the good, it is the irrational part in human soul that is responsible for what is considered as not good. Additionally, he also claims that some humans are born with special characteristics to become philosophers and they should lead the way to the others in order to take them out of their ignorance. The importance of education is emphasized in Plato’s work but it is also implied that the souls who are not virtuous by their nature will not be able to handle the truth and will choose to remain in dark. The myth of Er in book 10 serves as a good example to see how Socrates defines souls with permanent characters that in afterlife they choose a coherent new life with their characteristics over and over again.
The understanding of character as dynamic, which results as explained from a series of choices and experiences, is present in Dante’s Divine Comedy with a higher resemblance to Aristotle’s dynamic character, but exercises different theological implications as the departure from antiquity to medieval ages and even early Renaissance takes place. Although Dante shows his familiarity with the Greek philosophy and literature by including names like Homer, Plato, and Virgil to his journey, his interaction and knowledge on the philosophical texts of antiquity is still not very clear. Nevertheless, it would not be wrong to claim that Dante’s notion of character also shows similarities with Plato’s in the sense of the endowments from birth. Dante renames what Plato calls the irrational part of the soul as desires. It is the strong emphasis on ‘free will’ that makes Dante’s understanding of character dynamic. Humans, naturally endowed with blinding desires, have also the intellect to control those desires in order to lead a virtuous life that is to say, in order not to sin. Based on Christian theology, Dante’s journey in his fictional afterlife serves as a detailed analysis on the nature of human desires and the success or failure of humans to overcome their possessions in this life according to their ability to use their intellect. Unlike the souls in the myth of Er that are destined to repetition even if they have the chance to choose, Dante’s souls in Divine Comedy vary from the static ones to the ones who are able to come to a realization and subject to change. The notion of free will is what makes character, as explained in the question, something attained and shaped, not something given.
Dante’s journey can be read as a metaphor to his self-realization that is to say the pilgrim Dante in Divine Comedy experiences a change in his character throughout the journey. After the loss of his pure earthly love Beatrice, he deviates from the peaceful state he was in and becomes possessed by the desire to know about his position in the cosmos. In such a state, blinded by his desire, he finds himself in a forest that is the start of the journey he was called to, by the same reason that made him lose his sight. In the divine context of the journey Beatrice, a pure soul from the heaven, sent Virgil to guide Dante through the circles of Inferno and the terraces of Purgatorio to lead him to the Divine Love. The loss of the earthly love he found strength in, caused him to rely too much on his intellect, but the transformation of that love to a courtly love guided his way to find answers that he could not reach only with his intellect but by using his intellect as a medium.
The concept and importance of reason is introduced right at the beginning of the poem when Dante and Virgil are in front of the Gate of Hell, Virgil says to Dante: “…where you will see the miserable people, those who have lost the good of the intellect.”[1] From that point, the journey in Inferno sets out examples of souls who were not able to use the good of their intellect because they were surrendered to their humanly desires or even worse, the souls being punished after the Gate of Dis that used their intellect viciously. The case with Ulysses in Canto XXVI serves as a good example of how Dante implies a balance for human character that should both be virtuous and able to control his desires with the powers of his intellect. Ulysses says while he is telling his story to Dante:
“Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
you were not made to live your lives as brutes,
but to be followers of worth and knowledge.”[2]
From those lines it is understood that Ulysses is a virtuous character concerning the greatness of worth and knowledge, but he is so obsessed with reaching the knowledge by means of his intellect that he drives his ship to unknown waters where death finds him and his comrades. In a way it is possible to say that Ulysses’s story is a confrontation for Dante with his own desires. Grasping a greater knowledge is one of Dante’s desires that actually makes him place himself as the first character in such a journey. He also believes in the strength of poetry and he also confronts his that obsession in literature in Francesca’s story by claiming that a literary piece can be as blinding as such to commit unexpected sins. From that perspective, it is possible to see the change in Dante’s character as passive in the beginning to being dynamic. In Inferno, where the static souls condemned to misery for eternally are, Dante faints several times after what he sees. He is in a half sleepy mode all the time and he needs Virgil’s guidance, and protection. Inferno is the place Dante himself also considers the sins he possibly committed up until that time in his life, but he still does not know how to handle his desires. Only after Virgil disappears on the Earthly Paradise and Dante confesses his sin to Beatrice, he gets out that half sleepy state and becomes active. In other words, he is not anymore driven unconsciously to the souls who are suffering instead he turns his head to look at the light intentionally, meaning that his character went through a change that he is in control of his own actions from now on.
The whole journey is fictionalized with a strong reliance on the Christian Theology, that is to say Christian teaching defines human nature as a body that will expire at some point and the souls that found form in that bodies will be judged according to the life they led on earth to find a place in the infinite kingdom of God. The important ingredient in that teaching is the use of human intellect, in other words humans are free to choose whatever action to take on earth, but that intellect is only a medium to grasp the beauties of afterlife because a final understanding of the meaning of existence is a kind of knowledge that only God has. In that respect, human existence finds its completeness only by reaching the Divine Love as Dante puts it with Beatrice’s words:
“The greatest gift the magnanimity
of God, as He created, gave, the gift
most suited to His goodness, gift that He
most prizes, was the freedom of the will;
those beings that have intellect – all these
and none but these – received and do receive
this gift: thus you may draw, as consequence,
the high worth of a vow, when what is pledged
with your consent encounters God’s consent;
for when a pact is drawn between a man
and God, then through free will, a man gives up
what I have called his treasure, his free will…”[3]
The emphasis of Christianity is so strong in medieval ages that it reflects upon literature to a great extent as well. Although based on the Christian theology, it can be claimed that Divine Comedy differs from the other texts of the medieval age in the sense that the set-up of the poem is based on the individual actions, not on God. God is only referred as the Divine Love in Inferno and Purgotorio and with a clearer reference in Paradiso, but the main emphasis of Dante’s journey is more on the consequences of human actions and the importance of free will rather than God’s existence and his rule. In that respect, the text with all its religious mysticism, and also with its modern focus on the individual can be seen as a passage from the late medieval period to Renaissance. It is with Renaissance that the strong influence of religion leaves its place to more humanistic approaches in every field of life as well as in literature. So, it is now appropriate to consider how this change affected the reflection of human character in literary texts by comparing the notion of character in a quattrocento text, The Prince, to Dante’s notion.
First of all, I should state that the notion of character in Machiavelli’s The Prince is not as clear as Dante’s notion to analyze, so to lessen the ambiguity that will occur from the complex structure of such a character, it is important to note that the analysis will focus on the characteristics of the prince. The characteristics that are attained to the public differs from the character of the prince, public is shown in Machiavelli’s text as the viewer of the image of the prince and they favor him or disapprove him according to the image he reflects on those people. Since Machiavelli provides an in depth analysis of the characteristics of the prince I will follow his path.
Machiavelli makes in The Prince a list of characteristics which the prince should have and should not have but the most important entry of the list is the ability of the prince to adopt to the situation he is in, which is prudence as a virtue. He claims in part XV that he offers a new set of values that are for practical use, referring to the ideal characteristics that were attained to the rulers of the republics and principalities before. After listing some of the vices and virtues in that part, such as being cruel, compassionate, religious, courageous, flexible, frivolous so on and so forth, he claims that it would be most laudable if a prince possessed all the good qualities. “But, because of conditions in the world, princess cannot have those qualities, or observe them completely. So a prince has of necessity to be so prudent that he knows how to escape the evil reputation attached to those vices which could lose him his state, and how to avoid those vices which are not so dangerous, if he possibly can; but if he cannot, he need not worry so much about the latter. And then, he must not flinch from being blamed for vices which are necessary for safeguarding his state. This is because, taking everything into account, he will find that some of the things that appear to be virtues will, if he practices them, ruin him, and some of the things that appear to be vices will bring him security and prosperity.” In short, what he claims in this passage is that a prince, although it would be better for him to have all the virtues, should not necessarily be virtuous at all times. What he should really look after is to appear virtuous even if he is not so. He forms his argument on the basis of reality being different from the ideal. In that sense, what he offers is a new set that considers the ‘real’ in terms of the ‘ideal’ rather than considering the ‘ideal’ in terms of the ‘real’. In other words, his approach to character is humanist that is to say he bases his argument on the historical examples and practical activity rather than theory.
Although Machiavelli explains the prince’s character endowed with the virtue of prudence, the ambiguity of the character still remains because the analysis of the character is accessible only through the image of the prince. Machiavelli talks about the importance of imitation for the prince in part VI: “So a prudent man must always follow in the footsteps of great men and imitate those who have been outstanding.” Machiavelli suggests that the prince should imitate the great men if he fails to sustain the borders of his power. This imitation process can be questioned since it is not clear how that process works for the prince. My suggestion is that it works reciprocally. First, the prince starts to imitate the great men, than if he also has similar virtues but were unable to exercise them before, he becomes one of the great men. Without having the know-how it is not easy to imagine a prince becoming successful only by imitating. But Machiavelli relates this form and reality contrast only to appearance, because if a prince can make people believe that he is virtuous as the great men he imitates, then he will be seen as successful although he is not. So, the matter comes to create an illusion on the other eyes. If the ambiguity of the character of the prince could only be reduced to the virtue of prudence than one could easily agree with Machiavelli, but he also claims that nobody, even the closest person to the prince should not know his true character. That is why I leave the discussion on the notion of character for Machiavelli here and continue with the comparison of Dante’s notion of character to Machiavelli’s notion of character as a mixture of the image and the self relying on Machiavelli’s description in part XV.
Both Dante’s and Machiavelli’s notions of character are dynamic because Dante’s reason also applies for Machiavelli. But the use of reason differs to a great extent in two texts. While Dante uses reason to reach an understanding of the transcendence, Machiavelli offers the use of intellect for the earthly life. Dante argues that intellect should be used to control the animal like desires of the person but Machiavelli suggests that the prince should be a fox and a lion at the same time. Dante is ready to hand back his intellect to the great creator in the end, but Machiavelli defines no greater authority for his prince and even encourages him to enlarge his power if he is already able to sustain what he rules. Those examples show that the characters in both texts are subject to change by using their intellect but the difference lies on the point where they turn to. In that respect, Dante’s notion of character is a part of a divine design based on Christian theology, whereas Machiavelli’s notion of character lacks that religious ingredient and it is totally down to earth.
At this point, I would like to introduce a short analysis of Michelangelo’s David that can be related to both Dante’s ‘character’ in the sense that David is a biblical character as stated in the Bible: “skillful in playing (the harp), a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence; and the LORD is with him.”[4], and also to Machiavelli’s ‘character’ because it still serves as one of the best forms in sculpture. As discussed above, imitation and form are the most striking qualities of the prince. In that sense, David, just like Machiavelli wants his prince to be, is considered to be the finest form of art because it mimics the divine creation. The artistic discipline that David is categorized in is built on the knowledge of the male human form. The sculpture is not in true proportions to human body, with the head and the hands larger than normal form. This is claimed to be as Michelangelo’s mannerism, and it suits to the discussion of the dynamic notion of character as stated in Aristotelian system regarding the character’s authenticity that the character must never be absolutely perfect. We can see the traces of this claim in Dante simply with his argument on defining the human character as a part of divine design that can never be complete without reaching the Divine Love. And, also Machiavelli severally states in his book that since this is the earthly world that the prince is operating, there is no such thing as ‘ideal’. As a last note, it is also important how Michelangelo gives character to David. Unlike Verrochio’s and Donatello’s Davids, Michelangelo has depicted David before the battle over Goliath. He managed to give an expression to David’s face showing his state before the battle as tense, but tense in a mental sense. That is a really impressive aspect of the sculpture because it shows that emotions can also be attributed to the sculpture else than the detailed works on the shape of the body.
In conclusion, the notion of human character was one of the main issues of literature and other arts starting from the late medieval ages and throughout Renaissance. From a historical context, it is possible to claim with the above analysis that medieval ages formed a basis for the appearances of some ideas in Renaissance as in the case of the notion of free will that later affected the birth of humanism after the church loses its strength. From Dante to Machiavelli the great shift occurs in the notion of character with the loss of emphasis on religion that also can be felt in the texts of Machiavelli’s contemporaries. That kind of a change can also be noted in the art scene for example by the presentation of nude biblical figures, like David, with a great influence of the pagan Greek Antiquity. Also, regarding the notion of character, sculptures gained dynamism with contrapposto style of posing the human form, which Michelangelo also used for David. Contrapposto is a technique that enables a movement for the sculpture from the stone that it is attached to, metaphorically speaking, that is the idea present in the texts with humans being free to choose their actions and the work of art in analysis as well as the general source of Renaissance: the movement.
4 Ekim 2009 Pazar
The Decameron: De/Re-Construction of Literature
The Decameron is said to be the start of a new new understanding of morality in literature in medieval times. This claim can be regarded as true when the context of the stories in The Decameron is considered. The themes of passionate lovers and their intercourses, curious nuns, covetous clergymen are not mainly the topics that the writers or poets of the time had touched upon before. It is known that most of the stories that Boccaccio included in his book were already orally in circulation among the public. What Boccaccio did was to frame those stories with another story of the brigata and present them in The Decameron. The matter of bringing in a new form of morality may be ambiguous at first glance because it may mean a different understanding of vice and virtue, and since those stories are part of the public tradition, the themes of those stories are not the subject of this ‘new’ morality. Furthermore, one can interpret those themes as direct criticism to the oppression of the church, under which morality in its true sense is abused. What I understand from the new morality that Boccaccio brings in is his openness to carry those social matters on a literary level. Before Boccaccio, the literature of the period was heavily involved with philosophy or in praise of religion. As he himself claims in the prologue to day IV that he is writing about human life in its most naturalistic sense. What I will argue here by focusing on the incomplete story of Filippo Balducci is that Boccaccio is using this humble style in The Decameron as opposed to the high style of the period, with a specific aim of freeing the literature from its boundaries under the name of morality.
First of all, it will be appropriate to analyze in
what context Boccaccio tells the story of Filippo Balducci.
He claims in the prologue to day IV that there have been accusations against him on the basis of being too fond of women and he was given the advice to remain with the Muses in Parnasus. According to the advice he received, it can be said that the accusations are mainly on the morality of his work, because he is advised to remain with divine creatures rather than women. His so called accusers also said that he should better be employed in earning himself a good meal than in going hungry for the sake of producing nonsense of this sort. It is not certain whether Boccaccio was really exposed to such criticism even before he completed the writing of The Decameron, or was he very well aware of the potential criticism he will receive and wanted to prevent them by including his defense in the book beforehand. I assume the latter is more coherent with what I believe Boccaccio is trying to achieve with The Decameron. One by one he opposes the accusations that he himself created in order to prove that kind of discourse against his work is pretentious. He does this without any sign of vulgarity and in such a confident way that the reader comes to realize what he claims to be the accusations against his work is actually his criticism on the literary tradition of his period.
At this point I would like to clarify the discussion on morality and style. What I argue here a s Boccaccio's literary aim is not
liberation from the existing moral values, but from the high style of literature that separates it from the natural life. It is not hard to follow the traces of this argument with his strategic allusions in the prologue to day IV and especially in the story of the young Balducci’s education. After Filippo and his son move to Mount Asinaio, they live in complete isolation from the society and Filippo educates his son only on the eternal life and God, as Boccaccio puts it:
"At all times, he took very great care not to let him see any worldly things, or even to mention their existence,
lest they should distract him from his devotions. On the contrary, he was forever telling him about the glory of the life eternal, of God, and of the Saints, and all he taught him was to pray devoutly. He kept this up for a number of years, never permitting the boy to leave the cave or to see any living thing except for his father.”
It is important to notice Boccaccio’s interpretation
of this educational process is based not on "what to do's",
but "what not to do’s". Filippo takes great care ‘not to let him see any worldly things’, ‘not to leave the cave’. In the passage above, all the worldly things are expressed with negative expressions, whereas Boccaccio uses positive expressions like ‘forever’ and ‘all he thought him was…’ while talking about the eternal life. In this sense, the education of the young boy and the criticism on his work show similarities on discourse. Boccaccio was advised to ‘not to produce that sort of nonsense’, but rather ‘remain’ with the Muses.
Although Boccaccio claims that he tells this story to
show how it is impossible even for the young Balducci,
who was raised in complete isolation, to resist the natural attraction he feels towards women, his story points out his allusive criticism on a certain style of education and the use of literature. The failure of Filippo in his son’s education when he takes him to Florence can be interpreted as the failure of the strategies of negation. In the story, the peak of this negation is when Filippo names women as “goslings” while he is striving to prevent the collapse of his educational technique at the moment of his son’s encounter with women. Boccaccio here, by being witty, shows how those negation strategies prove to be ridiculous when they are threatened by the forces of the nature which can also be reflected on the natural consequences of the plague and the wind of change it created in the society against the church. The morale of this story is what Boccaccio claims it to be that Nature shapes human beings in such a way, as they cannot but yield to the power of love. But it is equally true that he also proves a subtler, and in no way less important, methodological point: that a teaching based only on removal and repression is sooner or later destined to fail. Therefore, he aims to provide a diversity of stories on human emotions rather than excluding from his work what is socially repressed.
It requires some certain attention for the modern
reader to appreciate Boccaccio’s work because the modern reader's
perception on literature is not limited to the constraints of Boccaccio’s time. Therefore, it will not be wrong to claim that his work is revolutionary in the sense of his efforts to break the chains of literature from religion and philosophy. What is more important in that context is that he is devoted to his case. We can understand his devotion from his interruptions to his work as the author of the book in the prologue, epilogue and the prologue to day IV. In the prologue, he first describes the conditions that led to the out coming of his work. He gives his reasoning to be able to use a humble style to write stories, which are only for pleasure and not for higher artistic aims. He explains the general atmosphere of the era, how some people started to lose faith in church with regard to their experiences through the painful era of the plague. Then he moves on to defend his work against the general writing traditions of the period and the criticism caused by those norms in parallel with the story of the young boy’s education. In the end again, by using an allusive approach he claims only to serve ladies in order to give them pleasure, but the overall achievement of The Decameron in literature is pleasing for the continued existence of literature.
13 Haziran 2009 Cumartesi
15 Mayıs 2009 Cuma
As I walk through the circles of the shades of the dead..
As it is often said Divine Comedy, which tells Dante’s fictional journey from Inferno to Paradiso, is not a poem about the afterlife, but it is for the living, that is to say it is an allegory of human life from the lowest forms to the most virtuous form. In that respect, it can be regarded as the journey of self-realization in the process of searching for the place of human nature in the cosmos. Dante, as the only living soul going through the circles of the Inferno to lead his way to Paradiso, places himself in the center of the poem meaning that this journey is in a way his journey of self-realization. After the loss of his pure earthly love Beatrice, he deviates from the peaceful state he was in and becomes possessed by the desire to know about his position in the cosmos. In such a state, blinded by his desire, he finds himself in a forest that is the start of the journey he was called to, by the same reason that made him lose his sight. In the divine context of the journey Beatrice, a pure soul from the heaven, sent Virgil to guide Dante through the circles of Inferno and the terraces of Purgatorio to lead him to the Divine Love. The loss of the earthly love he found strength in, caused him to rely too much on his intellect, but the transformation of that love to a courtly love guided his way to find answers that he could not reach only with his intellect but by using his intellect as a medium.
Dante encounters suffering souls in the Inferno and Purgatorio for various sins they had committed during their life time. In Inferno, where the static souls condemned to misery for eternally are, Dante faints several times after what he sees. He is in a half sleepy mode all the time and he needs Virgil’s guidance, and protection. Inferno is the place Dante himself also considers the sins he possibly committed up until that time in his life, but he still does not know how to handle his desires. Only after Virgil disappears on the Earthly Paradise and Dante confesses his sin to Beatrice, he gets out that half sleepy state and becomes active. In other words, he is not anymore driven unconsciously to the souls who are suffering, instead he turns his head to look at the light intentionally, meaning that his character went through a change that he is in control of his own actions from now on. What is important for the sake of the analysis on self-realization here is to focus on Dante’s encounter with the sins that he attributes to himself, namely, possession of romantic love, relying on the power of literature, and his obsessive search for truth by means of intellect. Divine comedy is such a masterpiece because Dante uses counter virtues of the sins he believes that he committed to express them in his poem, by applying the rules of poetic justice. Poetic justice is a term derived by Aristotle’s attempts to explain poetry as a medium, which is superior to history in the sense that it shows what should or must occur, rather than merely what does occur. The concept of contrapasso, i.e. that the sin and the punishment itself are essentially the same, plays an important role for Dante, in order to communicate with the reader through his poetic justice. Before proceeding with Dante’s encounter with Ulysses, I would briefly like to mention his first encounter with the punishment that those receive who committed the sin of the possession of romantic love, Francesca and Paolo. That sin is also in a way relates to Dante, because after the death of Beatrice, Dante possessed by his romantic love loses his sight and turns too much to himself forgetting that he is a part of the divine design.
Dante meets Francesca on the second circle of Hell, which is the first circle that the souls endure punishments for their sins. Since the degree of the punishment gets heavier through the inner circles, possession of romantic love is the lightest crime in Dante’s Inferno. The reason for that can be explained by the nature of love. It is impossible to love any other person intentionally, love is the purest form of desire that is not related to any other materialistic gain. That is why it has to happen naturally or it would not be love. It is such a strong feeling that disables the person’s reason in his/her actions. As Francesca puts it:
Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart,
took hold of him because of the fair body
taken from me—how that was done stil wounds me.
Love, that releases no beloved from loving,
took hold of me so strongly through his beauty
that, as you see, it has not left me yet.[1]
It is understood from Francesca’s words that she is still in that state of being blindly in love.
Dante chooses the metaphor of a furious wind to describe this state, into which the lovers are thrown by their passionate feelings. In the moment of love they forget about the outside reality and driven into committing the sin of lustfulness by their desires. All the people Dante meets in that circle, Semiramis, Helen, Paris, Cleopatra, had caused great pain, even to the ones who are closest to them, in that state of blindness. That is why the punishment they endure is in the form of that assailing wind, driving on the spirits with its violence: wheeling and pounding, harassing them.[2] The sinners of the second circle, harassed by that storm are feeling the pain of both their love from inside and the punishment from outside. For Francesca’s case, she is suffering from that hellish hurricane but what is still more painful for her is the longing she feels for her lover. When Dante asks her about her longings she replies “There is no greater sorrow than thinking back upon a happy time in misery…”[3] This sentence is an emphasis on Dante’s first confrontation with his sins, because it also refers to his feelings after he loses Beatrice, physically, until he transforms his love to a medium to grasp the Divine Love.
The reference to the strength of poetry and literature is also important in Francesca’s story. She tells Dante that she fell in love with Paolo while reading Lancelot. As Dante used to write love stories before Divine Comedy, he knows how those stories could be evoking the inner most desires of humans. With Divine Comedy he changes the way that he uses his talent in order to analyze the human nature in a divine context and evoke virtuous behavior for the reader as well as himself. He tells in Canto XXVI:
and more than usual, I curb my talent,
that it not run were virtue does not guide;
so that, if my kind star or something better
has given me that gift, I not abuse it.[4]
In that context, for a better understanding of Dante’s self-realization it will be appropriate now to focus on his confrontation with the sin of possessing knowledge through his encounter with Ulysses.
Dante encounters Ulysses in the seventh pouch of the eight circle of Inferno being punished for the sin of spiritual theft. Ulysses and Diomedes, burning with fire as a fireball approach him and Virgil speaks to them asking one of them to tell how he died. Ulysses starts telling the story of his last journey after he sailed away from Circe, how his fondness for his son or his love for Penelope was not able to defeat in him the longing that he had to gain experience of the world and of the vices and the worth of men. His intention is to reach what is beyond the seen, as he tells to his comrades:
‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘o you, who having crossed
a hundred thousand dangers, reach the west,
to this brief waking-time that stil is left
unto your senses, you must not deny
experience of that which lies beyond
the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled.
Consider well the seed that gave you birth:
You were not made to live your lives as brutes
But to be followers of worth and knowledge.’[5]
After seeing a very high and dark mountain, the sea closes over Ulysses and his comrades. Ulysses was punished by facing his death just like in the story of Babel Tower that was build to reach heaven and the builders of the tower were punished by being sent to different parts of the world and given different languages in order not to be able to communicate with each other and give up their trial to reach heaven by physical means.
Ulysses’ story shows great similarity with Dante’s story on the basis of their search what is beyond the sun. Before Beatrice calls him for his transcendental journey, Dante was in such a similar state to Ulysses that he was trying to understand the place of the human in the cosmos by means of his intellect, that is to say producing thoughts and theories according to what he sees on earth. He confesses to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise: “Mere appereances turned me aside with their false loveliness, as soon as I had lost your countenance.”[6] As Ulysses tries to go beyond the sun with the belief of driving his ship always to the west he will reach the unpeopled place, Dante uses his talent in poetry to see what is beyond his reach. He repetitiously uses the metaphor of poetry in his poem as the ship of the sailor—cantos I and VIII of Purgatorio—to indicate the voyage of the pilgrim soul towards God in Divine Comedy. In that respect, Dante directing his ship towards God with Divine Comedy, differs from the Pagan Ulysses, who is unaware that his aspiration to reach the forbidden ground is in a way challenging the Divine Law.
Dante’s whole journey is fictionalized with a strong reliance on the Christian Theology, that is to say Christian teaching defines human nature as a body that will expire at some point and the souls that found form in that bodies will be judged according to the life they led on earth to find a place in the infinite kingdom of God. The important ingredient in that teaching is the use of human intellect, in other words humans are free to choose whatever action to take on earth, but that intellect is only a medium to grasp the beauties of afterlife because a final understanding of the meaning of existence is a kind of knowledge that only God has. In that respect, human existence finds its completeness only by reaching the Divine Love as Dante puts it with Beatrice’s words:
“The greatest gift the magnanimity
of God, as He created, gave, the gift
most suited to His goodness, gift that He
most prizes, was the freedom of the will;
those beings that have intellect – all these
and none but these – received and do receive
this gift: thus you may draw, as consequence,
the high worth of a vow, when what is pledged
with your consent encounters God’s consent;
for when a pact is drawn between a man
and God, then through free will, a man gives up
what I have called his treasure, his free will…”[7]
In that sense, Ulysses’ journey to reach beyond the sun without such knowledge of God based on Christian Theology proves to be a futile impulse in Dante’s poem. Dante considers Ulysses’ aspiration as a noble one because his journey aims to understand the meaning of human life, but because he does not have a notion of God he fails in his mission. Ulysses does not know when to surrender his free will to God and pushes the limits of human possibility insistently. In the end Ulysses and his men perish in a whirlpool after seeing a dark image of Mount Purgatory from a distance but even before reaching it, since Mount Purgatory is off limits to Pagans. In that respect, it is possible to follow how similar Dante’s and Ulysses’ journey start and differ in the end with the last lines of Divine Comedy:
As the geometer intently seeks
to square the circle, but he cannot reach,
through thought on thought, the principle he needs,
so I searched that strange sight: I wished to see
the way in which our human effigy
suited the circle and found place in it –
and my own wings were far too weak for that.
But then my mind was struck by light that flashed
and, with this light, received what it had asked.
Here force failed my high fantasy; but my
Desire and will were moved already – like
A wheel revolving uniformly – by
The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.[8]
To conclude, Francesca’s and Ulysses’ stories are the two prominent parts of Dante’s poem in order to analyze his journey as the journey of his self realization in a divine context. Dante aiming to understand the cause of his existence bases his search on Christian teachings and acknowledges his possessions to purify his soul from the marks of the sins he committed by using the power of his poem. Francesca and Ulysses are the two figures that he chooses to express his confrontation with the sins of possession of love and knowledge. Francesca serves as a medium for him to express his longing for Beatrice and acknowledge the consequences of that longing. Ulysses’ story is a metaphor for his struggle to place human life on a broader context and find answers that he lacks. Dante places both characters in Inferno because the former ignores the greatness of Divine Love and the latter lacks the knowledge on the existence of a divine design. The pilgrim Dante witnesses their suffering and comes to realize the meaning of his existence in the divine design by means of the beautiful poetic design of Dante the poet.
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