In front of me and weeping, Ali walks,
his face cleft from the chin up to the crown.
The souls that you see passing in this ditch
were all sowers of scandal and schism in life,
and so in death you see them torn asunder."
(Inferno, Canto XXVIII)
This is probably the last post I will do on Dante in while, simply because I think that there is too much of him on this blog--this is an important post though, because it seeks to address one of the most troubling and (in our world) possibly unbeautiful set of verses in the poem. I also want to add that the crucial idea in this post belongs to EK one of the more erudite and exceptional teachers I have had in the past few years. EK's understanding of characters in the Inferno is based on the premise that it is not the largesse of the sin that causes Dante to place them in the Hell or Purgatory, but rather that in the act of sinning, a character has betrayed his or her own self. They go not against God or Church but against their own nature and thus are sent to a place where they radiate from their bodies, what it was that they did to harm their whole.
For the longest time, there was one figure who I failed to fit into this larger theory and that was Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. In the Inferno, he is doomed to one of the lower and hence worse circles of Hell, accompanied by his own nephew and early convert, Ali. The question kept coming up-- how has a figure like him betrayed his self? It is not the later Islamic conquests that Dante evokes, but the early figure of Islam himself.
I communicated this anxiety to EK who also reads this as an ugly moment in Dante's writing, but who did provide the following important fact about Dante's world: Dante did not see the Prophet Muhammad as living in a pagan world, but rather as a Christian who actively broke with the Church to found a new religion against Christianity rather than one in conjunction with it. In the medieval imagination, everyone was Christian. There was very little sense of geography and culture. Rather there was the Christian world and there was not. Muhammad came into the former category and is then a figure who causes "schism" and "sows scandal." We have seen a similar approach to Islam in Le Chanson de Roland-the twelfth century French poem-- and it will continue till the Renaissance when the Western world begins to better understand what is outside of itself.
This explanation, as I hope my readers already know, is not a way of excusing or diminishing the gravity of accusation and portrayal. It is, however, an attempt to help [many of] us to continue accessing a text that has inspired vision and voice; and that has preserved the sinner and transported the virtuous. It doesn't make Dante's medieval anger okay but if it brings us closer to his figure as he wrote the Commedia (the image of a medieval Florentine coffee-shop is amusing), and if it helps us just a little bit to understand his art, then I think this would be a good place for me to stop dwelling on the Inferno, and maybe institute a move to the humanists we haven't got enough of.
For the longest time, there was one figure who I failed to fit into this larger theory and that was Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. In the Inferno, he is doomed to one of the lower and hence worse circles of Hell, accompanied by his own nephew and early convert, Ali. The question kept coming up-- how has a figure like him betrayed his self? It is not the later Islamic conquests that Dante evokes, but the early figure of Islam himself.
I communicated this anxiety to EK who also reads this as an ugly moment in Dante's writing, but who did provide the following important fact about Dante's world: Dante did not see the Prophet Muhammad as living in a pagan world, but rather as a Christian who actively broke with the Church to found a new religion against Christianity rather than one in conjunction with it. In the medieval imagination, everyone was Christian. There was very little sense of geography and culture. Rather there was the Christian world and there was not. Muhammad came into the former category and is then a figure who causes "schism" and "sows scandal." We have seen a similar approach to Islam in Le Chanson de Roland-the twelfth century French poem-- and it will continue till the Renaissance when the Western world begins to better understand what is outside of itself.
This explanation, as I hope my readers already know, is not a way of excusing or diminishing the gravity of accusation and portrayal. It is, however, an attempt to help [many of] us to continue accessing a text that has inspired vision and voice; and that has preserved the sinner and transported the virtuous. It doesn't make Dante's medieval anger okay but if it brings us closer to his figure as he wrote the Commedia (the image of a medieval Florentine coffee-shop is amusing), and if it helps us just a little bit to understand his art, then I think this would be a good place for me to stop dwelling on the Inferno, and maybe institute a move to the humanists we haven't got enough of.
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