ABSTRACT
Somewhere along the long road of its intellectual history Christian metaphysics got stuck in the ontological ice of monotheism and has not been able to thaw itself out sufficiently to re-enter the world and make sense to everyday people. To call it ontological ice is, of course, to say something else as well. Ice is water-the solution necessary for life-a richly malleable substance, infinitely shape-shifty when it is warm and especially when it is hot. Ice is water appearing to be still. We might say, for metaphoric purposes, that ice aspires to stasis. It does so via the absence of warmth. What a lovely metaphor this is for the problem of the One in Christian theology! It is lovely because the problem of the One in Christian theology could be viewed, from a certain poetic and allegorical angle, as a problem of too little warmth. In my reading of the complex history of monotheism in the west, I have
pointed to its emergence in association with times of deep communal threat, of loss, and of cultural shifting. One way to tell the story is that, at many points along the way, divinity that was poured out like a libation for a people battered by change, war, and uncertainty, became a prisoner of the people’s fear. They attempted to freeze the divine in crystalline structures of mathematics or in the gilt armor of warrior kings to reassure themselves of its allegiance and presence, to keep it from soaking into the ground, or from rising up in a vapor; and eo ipso to keep divinity-and themselves-from ever changing again. The people became afraid of the
waters of life, pretending that the ice that had been their living, changing divinity was not wet, not fertile, not changing, and finally not even God. The Divine to them became Something Else; it floated up into a more dry, faraway place. But despite such disassociative fears, the waters off of the Deep End remained, and so became a repository of the people’s repressed terror of change; no longer did they think of the fluid depths as the very substance of divinity. To control their fears, to hide from life lived in the midst of sometimes cruel change and flux, they froze the Deep. They trapped their fear of change and with it their lives. They became very, very cold, and wondered why they could never quench their thirst. That is one story. Here is another. The place is Italy, the time around the
year 1300 CE. An educated, middle-aged man was exiled from his native city-state of Florence, having ended up on the wrong side of the Guelph/ Ghibelline power struggles there. While in Rome on diplomatic business for his White Guelph clan and constituents, he learned that the pope had secretly conspired with the Black Guelphs and Ghibellines to kill or exile his kindred. In this Hatfield/McCoy-like drama, the man also learned that if he ever returned home to Florence, he would be burned to death aliveigne comburetur sic quod morietur.3 So rather than meet that painful fate, he wandered the length and breadth of the Italian-speaking countryside, mourned his lost city and family, and wrote about Hell. Of course, once he had done so (like Milton three hundred years later), he felt obliged to write about Purgatory and Heaven, too. But any reader of Dante Alighieri’s tripartite La Divina Comedia can see that it was neither the regimented logic of Purgatory nor the serene choruses of Heaven that got his creative genius for verse going. Whether approached as populist criticism of a corrupt government and
church or as indigenous art, whether a theological vision or as the first blockbuster hit of the Italian hoi polloi (Dante wrote in Italian, the cadence and language of the street and countryside, not in Latin, the language of the church and its doctors) the Inferno is a rich, robust, and bawdy read. In addition, the poem offers one angry and broken-hearted man’s vision of the deepest heart of Hell that, beyond explicit (and satisfyingly vivid) excoriations of the medieval church’s hypocrisy and corruption, paints a striking and provocative picture of the limits of the church’s metaphysics. The Inferno begins in the middle of Dante’s life, in the middle of a
wood, in the middle of the world. The poet awakes on the road to the realization that he is lost:
Half-way through the story of my life I came to in a gloomy wood4
This opening is not unlike the many creation stories of Native North America that begin more or less in the middle, quite simply, with the words
‘‘There was a village,’’ or ‘‘Hare [Trickster] was on his way to a village.’’5
There is no obsession here with absolute beginnings and endings, even though Dante’s vision can be read as a specifically Christian metaphysical imagining of hopes, fears, and ends. La Divina Comedia is concerned, from the very first stanza of the Inferno, with being in the middle, faced with complexity and the multiplicity of options that characterize even the meanest life. The three parts of the trilogy form an allegory of relational consequences-a geography and ontology of human enmeshment in world, bodies, relations, and divinity (both monstrous and tame). Dante relates his attempts to climb out of the dark valley in which he
first finds himself, only to find that his way is blocked by various monstrous animals. He is rescued, however, by the appearance of the long-dead pagan poet Virgil, who informs Dante that the only way out of his current fix-the only way to find his way-is through Hell itself. Virgil declares to Dante’s delight that he, Dante’s own favorite poet, will escort the Florentine exile there, ‘‘where you’ll hear the shrieks, unqualified / by hope, of those who suffer so much pain, / each wishes he died a second time.’’6
Dante has ‘‘awoken’’ into a realm of ghosts, spirits, and animal servants, assuring his listeners that he is as incredulous as they, but insisting thereby on the veracity of his tale. He has, one could say, removed the blinders on his mundane life and glimpses, through the porosity of dream, vision, and the poet’s pen a closely abutting world of difference. This is a non-reductive awakening to difference that Voltaire, Bacon, and the princes of colonial Reason would thoroughly have rejected. It is not, however, an awakening that would startle the majority of the peoples of the earth whose primary point of reference is not the narrow vision of western empiricism. As Calvin Martin pointedly asks in his own study of the brittle inadequacy of modernity’s metaphysics, ‘‘whose reason is it, after all, that moves the Spirit of the Earth in its errands?’’7
