Back from a Hiatus
Announcing a new series: "From Homer to Dante"
Hello fellow Tourists,
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, almost two years to be exact. At first it was a new job, then academic studies, and well, “one thing led to another”—you know how it goes. But recently several of you inquired about my writing plans (something I had already been considering) and your gentle nudges led me to take up my figurative pen again. Looking back, I think I needed this season of silence to discern, refine, and articulate the purpose that fuels my intellectual life: recovering the tradition of contemplating the highest things. To this end, I’m happy to note that interest in the “Great Books”—those beacons of knowledge and wisdom illuminating the Humane Tradition—continues to surge in defiance of an ever-encroaching technological servitude. So I’m back now with a renewed commitment to fulfill my pledge to readers in my inaugural post:
If you, the reader, will undertake this journey with me through our Great Tradition with all the curiosity and wonder of a wide-eyed traveler, I will endeavor to share fresh and enchanting perspectives as your co-traveler and guide.
A significant event that happened during my hiatus was the collapse of the Online Great Books program which had previously provided much of my writing material. Due to his changing sentiments about online reading groups—and the challenges of managing our growing community, perhaps?—the founder announced rather suddenly last fall that he was shutting down our Slack community and subscription service. Existing members were encouraged to form in-person reading groups locally, but my seminar group decided to stick together online and craft our own reading program. Under our new motto, “Great Books on Purpose” (GBOP), we’ve adopted (and adapted) Mortimer Adler’s 10-Year Reading Plan—skipping the works we’ve already covered and taking turns facilitating the monthly seminar. It is working well so far and I expect I’ll still write about this experience from time to time.
For now, though, I’m planning to focus on a new series, “From Homer to Dante: A Journey to Wholeness.” The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri is an epic work from the 14th century that presents us with an honest and unflinching examination of the problems and paradoxes of our human condition. With Dante the pilgrim, we first plumb the depths of human dysfunction (aka Hell), atone for our mistakes and self-conceit (Purgatory), and finally attain the blessed vision of happiness (Paradise). Along the way, we encounter many unforgettable figures from all walks of life: men and women preserved in literary history at their personal best or worst…and every condition in between.
Many would-be modern readers, however, find Dante rather too daunting at first. We know him as a medieval writer at the vanguard of Renaissance humanism, drawing from an encyclopedic classical tradition that is unfamiliar to many of us, so we naturally assume that his stories are simply out of our reach. But it is precisely this ability of Dante to “bring out of his treasure both the new and the old”1 that make him a model for anyone wanting to join in the Great Conversation today. This series, therefore, is aimed at accomplishing two goals:
To expose you to many of the earlier works that inspired Dante so that you can read The Divine Comedy with confidence and understanding.
To help you explore human nature in all its spiritual, relational, and psychological complexity so you can apply these insights to your own spiritual journey.
I want to also add that there is a third (personal) goal driving my work: to better understand the experience of living through the end of an intellectual age. Dante can be considered one of the last great minds from the Middle Ages. Even as he wrote his magnificent poem, the intellectual ground beneath him was beginning its seismic shift towards modernity. Now in the 21st century, like the opposing bookend to Dante, we are living in the collapse of that modern age. I’ll say more on this at some point, I’m sure, but many people are now speculating about the emergence of a new philosophy, science, and worldview that are appearing—though their final shapes and trajectories are still far from certain. It is in this regard that I feel a certain kinship with Dante and look to him as a guide for making my way through the murky woods of our own times.
Thanks for checking this out and happy reading!
Cf Matt 13:52 NRSV
Regarding the collapse of the modern age, what I understand by "modernism" is a project to write new scripts, to no longer be bound by old social scripts or contexts.
So modernists like Joyce or Eliot created new creation myths like Ulysses or The Waste Land. Fitzgerald in America created Gatsby—he personalized the new myth of the self-made man, the modern man.
So when we think about the end of the modern age, this is the direction my mind turns. If modernism was a project to write new scripts, then the end of modernity presumably means a return to older scripts. Like Dante.
But if we assume as a premise that society and history are a social artifact that we create, then a return to older scripts risks humanizing or mythologizing the social reality we currently inhabit, this is called by the philosophers right-wing Hegelianism.
This isn't an exclusively modern problem, Confucianism for example was largely concerned with the problem of ritual and stereotyped roles that deprive us of our vitality and our capacity to write new scripts, new ways of being in the world.
So the "end of an intellectual age" as you call it seems to me to be a crisis of vitality. Robin Lane Fox the great historian wrote a book called Pagans and Christians about the disappearance of paganism. Men gradually no longer called on the old gods, and that's how paganism disappeared into the twilight.
As a writer I'm in favor of a recovery of meaning through literary tradition. Sure someone could rewrite the Inferno as a modern story. That would be a very modernist thing to do.
But we can also go back to Dante or other old scripts so long as we keep in mind the end goal. We want to empower ourselves to write new scripts in the present.
If we're at the end of the modern age, then modernism itself is part of history now. We can learn from its revisionary project but we don't have to adopt the modernists' absolute devotion to newness. The recovery of history is always a recovery of possibilities.
Happy memories of discovering Inferno, which I read as a college junior - one way to avoid the work for a particularly boring economics course!