Monday
As we look ahead to President Biden’s challenges, the major one may be reactionary resentment. Although it is clear that we need high levels of federal spending to address Covid needs and skyrocketing unemployment, right on cue the GOP is throwing up roadblocks. After running up the deficit with profligate tax cuts for the wealthy, Republican legislators are declaring that America can’t afford to help those in need.
I’m wondering whether Dante’s Purgatorio offers a credible case for optimism. On the second terrace (cantos XIII-XV), we encounter formerly resentful souls who have seen the light.
Dante doesn’t underestimate the power of resentment and neither should we. It has proven noxious throughout U.S. history, possessing as it does both an economic and a racial component. Since immigrants, upon arriving, witnessed African Americans at the bottom of the social scale, they came to see a caste system as part of the American Dream. Success meant that you at least rose higher than they did, which meant that black success could be experienced as threatening. After all, if African Americans do better than you, then you are a failure, which is why many regarded the Obama presidency as an existential threat. The resentment directed toward the first black president was something to behold.
Even our country’s successes have been built on the back of this resentment. Whites have embraced government programs as long as Blacks have been excluded, as was the case with both Roosevelt’s Social Security and the post-World War II GI bill. Johnson’s anti-poverty and affirmative action programs and Obama’s Affordable Care Act fueled backlash.
Resentment, which is inextricably bound up with envy, is not just a lower class vice. The very wealthy can be resentful, as we saw with Trump’s envious resentment of Obama. Some of the GOP’s billionaire backers appear maddened by it. They resemble Dante’s wealthy Sapia of Siena.
Sapia tells Dante that, when alive, her “heart conceived more joy from others’ loss than my own gain.” For instance, she rejoiced when her own countrymen were conquered by the invading Florentines:
Beaten they were, and fled in bitter rout;
And there thrilled through me, when I saw the chase,
Such glee as till that hour I’d tasted not.
The passage reminds me of Envy’s self description in Doctor Faustus:
I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife. I cannot read, and therefore wish all books were burnt. I am lean with seeing others eat. O, that there would come a famine through all the world, that all might die, and I live alone! then thou shouldst see how fat I would be. But must thou sit, and I stand? come down, with a vengeance!
Better to burn everything down than learn to read and collectively increase food production.
Guido del Duca is similarly resentful:
And in my heart such envy used to burn,
If I’d caught someone looking pleased with life,
Thou wouldst have seen how livid I could turn.
Looking back, he wonders–as Biden must wonder–why humans turn against each other instead of working together in partnership:
I reap the straw whose seed I sowed so rife;
Why, why set heart on things which must forbid
All partnership, O human race at strife?
The envious in Purgatory have had their eyelids wired shut, a sign that they cannot see God’s mercy and generosity. Aglauros, a jealous sister in Roman mythology who was turned to stone when she denied Mercury access to her sister, describes this limited vision:
The high heavens call you and about you wheel,
Showing eternal beauties to invite you;
But all you see’s the earth beneath your heel,
And therefore doth the All discerning smite you.
If your envy means more to you than God’s gifts, you create your own hell.
I promised some optimism so here it is. These souls are in Purgatory, not Inferno, which means that they aren’t absolutely stuck in their resentment. Static though our politics may seem, people are capable of moving to a better place. Sapia shifted when a celebrated hermit beyond the reach of envy “showered his holy prayers upon me.”
Expressing remorse for resentment will get you to Purgatory, but opening yourself to the Angel of Generosity will get you to Paradise. This angel is so dazzling that the pilgrim Dante at first must shade his eyes:
So, from before me, on these eyes of mine
Such a reflected brilliance seemed to smite
That they shrank promptly from the blinding shine.
“O my dear father, what is this so bright,
No effort serves to screen it off,” said I,
“And moving toward us, if I guess aright?”
Virgil explains that it takes time to embrace generosity:
Full soon, to look on beings such as this
Shall be to thee no burden, but a cause
Of all thy nature can endure of bliss.
Like many resentful Americans, Dante is not there yet. How, he wonders, can we get more by sharing? What did Guido del Duca mean by “partnership”?
Virgil explains that he must think beyond material possession. I love his bellows metaphor:
You set desire where sharing with one’s fellows
Means that each partner gets a smaller share,
Wherefore you sigh, and envy works the bellows.
Did but the love of the most lofty sphere
Turn your desires to take the upward way,
Your hearts were quit of all the fearful care;
Because the more there are who there can say
“Ours,” the more goods each has, and charity
Burns in that cloister with a larger ray.
For a while, Dante still fails to get it:
How can it be that, when a greater throng
Divides the goods, there is more wealth for each
Than if a few possessed them all along?
Virgil tries again:
Because once more thy mental reach
Stops short at earthly things, thy dullard mood
From truth’s own light draws darkness black as pitch.
If the envious were only to see the “infinite and unexpressive” generosity of God, Virgil explains, then they would no longer be stuck in themselves. The scales—or in this case, wires—would fall from their eyes.
The beauty of one who is “lavish of self”—who gives generously—is so dazzling that envy is swept aside. “All fires it finds it feeds,” Virgil says and then explains that, with more acts of charity, more people experience God’s love. Enamored souls function as mirrors to each other, multiplying the love:
The more enamored souls dwell there at once,
Ever the better and the more they love
Each glassing each, all mirrors and all suns.
A major theme of the Divine Comedy is that Virgil, representing Reason, can only take Dante so far. Divine love, represented by Beatrice, must clinch the insight. Once Dante opens his heart to love, Virgil tells him, the earthly cravings that feed envy will fall away:
Now, should my words thy hunger not remove,
Beatrice shalt thou see, and she’ll speak plain,
This and all cravings else to rid thee of.
And indeed, when Dante catches a glimpse of Beatrice, he is thrown into a “trance of ecstasy.” He finally gets in his heart what Virgil has been trying to communicate to his reason.
How does this apply to our moment in history? Well, the United States is a wealthy nation and has the capacity to share its resources. It could enact universal health care and affordable college and affordable childcare and a living minimum wage. It could subsidize those who are currently unemployed due to the pandemic. It could be generous.
This will mean the wealthiest amongst us giving up some of what they have. (They can afford it. Our current level of income equality matches that of the Gilded Age.) Virgil tells Dante that moving from “mine” to “ours”–what the GOP is calling socialism–leads to a far richer life than our internecine struggles.
Sapia of Siena gets a glimpse of this life before she dies, which is why she is in Purgatory. If, in a Biden administration, Trump supporters get a glimpse of the Angel of Generosity—of how much richer life can be when one’s eyes aren’t wired shut—then we all can start imagining a collective future together.
Further thought: Colleague John Reishman in our Dante discussion group points out that, because their eyes are wired shut, the envious can only get along through cooperation. They, like we, must learn to acknowledge how much we need each other if they are to move on to Paradise.
