Tuesday
The GOP leadership continues to astound. We thought we’d seen everything when Republicans supported the president after he used his position to pressure foreign powers into sliming his probable opponent, but not calling out his attempts to subvert the recent election takes their complicity to a whole new level.
I’ve written about how the vestibule of Dante’s Inferno is the proper place for GOP moderates, who occasionally say the proper thing, even as they avoid confronting Trump’s abuses. We’re now hearing cautious words from the Susan Collinses and Marco Rubios about Joe Biden’s victory. Like the fence-sitting angels in the poem, such people are shunned by both sides and their names are forgotten, but at least this is better than nothing. Virgil’s advice regarding them is good: “Let us not speak of them, but look, and pass.”
Those who are actively abetting Trump’s sedition, on the other hand, belong further down. I propose the eighth circle of hell, eighth bolgia (ditch), for Mitch McConnell and those others who, if not actually trying to steal the election for Trump, are using his attacks on our democracy for their own purposes. McConnell has a lot in common with Guido da Montefeltro.
Bolgia 8 is supposedly for fraudulent counselors, but Dante scholar Anna Hatcher convincingly argues that the label doesn’t fully capture the crimes of its two most famous inhabitants, Montefeltro and Ulysses. Their sin is using their considerable intelligence for destructive ends, thereby wasting and abusing God’s gifts.
Ulysses employs his compelling persuasive abilities to, among other things, enlist Achilles to join the war that will kill him and persuade his own men to follow him on a suicidal journey. Montefeltro thinks he can play tricks with heaven, getting a corrupt pope to guarantee him absolution in return for treacherous war advice. I’ll get to the McConnell parallels in a moment but, as you read Montefeltro’s words, notice how calculated he is. He always has an angle that absolves him of blame.
Calling himself an old military fox who prides himself on his stratagems, Montefeltro reaches a point in his life where he starts thinking of heaven. As he puts it, he lowers his sail, gathers in his lines, and becomes a Franciscan monk:
[M]y deeds
were not of the lion but of the fox: I raced
through tangled ways; all wiles were mine from birth,
and I won to such advantage with my arts
that rumor of me reached the ends of the earth.
But when I saw before me all the signs
of the time of life that cautions every man
to lower his sail and gather in his lines,
that which had pleased me once, troubled my spirit,
and penitent and confessed, I became a monk.
This calculated penitence and confession isn’t the end of it. Pope Boniface VIII, at war with the Colonna family for having disputed the legitimacy of his election, wants advice in how to extricate them from Palestrina fortress to which they have retreated. Montefeltro, after first receiving absolution for what he is about to propose, advocates offering them amnesty and then reneging on the promise. In his words, “[L]ong promise and short observance is the road/ that leads to the sure triumph of your throne.” The ploy works and Boniface razes Palestrina to the ground.
It was he [the pope] abused his sacred vows and mine:
his Office and the Cord I wore, which once
made those it girded leaner.
[Constantine] demanded my advice, and I kept silent
for his words seemed drunken to me. So it stood
until he said: "Your soul need fear no wound;
I absolve your guilt beforehand; and now teach me
how to smash Penestrino to the ground.
The Gates of Heaven, as you know, are mine
to open and shut, for I hold the two Great Keys
so easily let go by Celestine."
His weighty arguments led me to fear
silence was worse than sin. Therefore, I said:
"Holy Father, since you clean me here
of the guilt into which I fall, let it be done:
long promise and short observance is the road
that leads to the sure triumph of your throne."
Montefeltro may think the pope can grant him absolution, but Satan has other ideas, as Montefeltro learns after his death:
Later, when I was dead, St. Francis came to claim my soul, but one of the Black Angels said: 'Leave him. Do not wrong me. This one's name went into my book the moment he resolved to give false counsel. Since then he has been mine, for who does not repent cannot be absolved...
Applying this to McConnell, he cannot invokeDante contrasts Montefeltro with his son. Because the younger Montefeltro feels genuine contrition for a misspent life—I wrote about him yesterday—he goes to Purgatory rather than Inferno.
Both Ulysses and Montefeltro are trapped within impressive flames that give them stature but burn incessantly. The significance of the punishment is explained through reference to “the Sicilian bull,” one of Dante’s most terrifying images. Translator Dorothy Sayers explains:
This instrument of torture was made by Perillus for Phalaris, the Sicilian tyrant. The victims were roasted alive in it, and their yells, issuing through the brazen mouth, were supposed to sound like the bull bellowing. Phalaris, with grisly humour, tried the invention out on Perillus.
In other words, like Perillus, the two blazing intelligences Ulysses and Montefeltro find themselves trapped for eternity in a hell of their own contrivance. Their powerful words, which misled others, are now delivered in torment. When your compelling words issue out of your own hollowness, you can never escape your own flame.
McConnell constantly invokes the Constitution and the rule of law for whatever he does. For instance, here’s what he said to the Senate a few days after the election:
The core principle here is not complicated. In the United States of America, all legal ballots must be counted and illegal ballots must not be counted. The process should be transparent or observable by all sides, and the courts are here to work through concerns. Our institutions are actually built for this. We have the system in place to consider concerns, and President Trump is 100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.
Because there’s no question that Biden has won the election, McConnell is actually legitimizing Trump’s challenges with his disingenuous statement. You can no more cite democracy at the same time that you are working to undermine it than you can ask for God’s absolution at the same time you are committing crimes. The Black Angel makes this clear to Montefeltro:
[N]or can we admit the possibility
of repenting a thing at the same time it is willed,
for the two acts are contradictory.’
In all likelihood, McConnell wants to keep Trump supporters riled up enough to vote Republican in the upcoming special Georgia senate election, which will determine whether or not McConnell remains Senate Majority Leader. If he were to admit that Biden has won, Trump might sabotage the election out of spite.
Montefeltro is so devious that he tells Dante his story only because he thinks that no one in hell ever returns to the land of the living, where his interior workings could be exposed. “If I believed that my reply were made to one who could ever climb to the world again,” he says, “this flame would shake no more.”
McConnell is similarly calculating, and the result has been one of the Senate’s most consequential leaders. He has remade the judiciary in his own image and been brutally effective at ensuring that that nothing other than high-end tax cuts are passed. Norms have been shredded in the process, but as nothing matters to him other than wealth and power, it’s a tradeoff he makes willingly. The country be damned.
The Black Angels don’t have to wait until he dies to claim his soul. When this perpetually angry man delivers his pronouncements from the floor of the Senate, the emptiness of a roaring brass bull is there for all to see and hear.