Civic Passion and Responsibility/Play Dante
Exercise: Give students twenty minutes to browse sites (examples listed below) for a relatively current event that inspires their moral outrage, similar in intensity and scope to Dante's . Of course, as a teacher, you may want to create a setting that makes this sort of civic passion possible. To some extent, you will probably be facing disillusionment in government and other institutions that once had the universal transformative power to change the world, right down to being able to provide for the spiritual caretaking of the individual soul. Rooting out modern political apathy is no small task. However, it can be minimized with the analogue of Dantešs world, no matter how alien his medieval culture seems to us now.
Dante does not separate the salvation of the individual soul from that of society in general. The realm of the individual and social are inextricably bound, not simply metaphors for each other. Civic responsibility, for Dante, is an extension of his theology; the body politic is an extension of our own physical body. We choose to love or sin against God, our neighbors, or bodies, ourselves, and finally, our communities. Each of our sins has far-reaching consequences for society, especially if one has particular power or prestige; in which case, one's corrosive influence can be especially insidious and rampant, whereas with someone of little influence, the effects of identically infectious behavior stay relatively quarantined. Inverse to this notion is the more positive belief that not only are we responsible for our own salvation, i.e., our own actions, but for the effects our own actions have on others. Again, we are responsible for the good of our fellow women and men. This, I stress, is a radical philosophy for any day and age and will remain so. To imbue this sense of interconnectedness of the individual soul and the soul of the community in one's students so that in the end, it is felt as a visceral belief, is an invaluable lesson Dante's Comedy has to offer to them.
Dante constructs hell according to what extent the sinner damages this principle of the ideal society, described in the final cantica of the Comedy, Paradise. However, it is not only those who do damage that are condemned, it is those that deny any and all responsibility to create a perfect society. A self-contained moral life is not sufficient; this moral life must serve society. The Neutral and Cowardly Angels in the ante-chamber of Hell in Canto III of the Inferno, condemned for their hesitation and fear, are perfect examples of this type of non-committal life. I can quite easily see myself among these victims of viltade (or cowardice), along with nameless, numberless others. Hell is no joke. It is what we live, not some imagined netherworld. We create hell for ourselves by allowing ourselves to be dominated by certain impulses, to become less than human, in the Aristotelian sense. By surrendering our will to these destructive impulses, we shut off avenues of feeling crucial to onešs spiritual survival. "The lake of the heart becomes the frozen lake of Cocytus," says Joan Ferrante her book The Political Vision of the Divine Comedy. (For further reading, one may want to assign chapters of her book located in the Scholars' Work section of Digital Dante's Library.)
It is important that students have some idea of the structure Dante gave the Inferno before proceeding to place contemporary figures in different circles of Play Dante. Dante divide the baser sins of malice from those of incontinence. The sins of lust, gluttony, greed or envy, while indulging passions and distracting one from onešs duty to society, do not necessarily destroy the fabric of it. Sins of heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery, however, do destroy the fabric of society, for which they are separated in the City of Dis from those sins of incontinence in the upper circles . Fraud and treachery, i.e., acts of fraud committed against those to whom you have a special bond, are the most serious of sins, since they "deny the fundamental trust on which social and political relations are based."
Url s useful to Play Dante:
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DIGITALDANTE
Institute for Learning Technologies
dante@mailhub.ilt.columbia.edu
Copyright 1992-97
Last Modified November, 1997.