Billy Furley

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Really? I said again.But before I get to that, we need to identify Dante’s relevance for our time.For centuries his work served an entire civilization with its magnificent depictions of good and evil, of holiness, of how we miss the mark, of what it means to reach one’s deepest fulfillment.Over the last century, Dante has been pushed to the margins.The cosmology of his poem is no longer a viable vision of the universe.The simplistic criticism of The Divine Comedy is that Dante presents his vision in a geocentric cosmology in which all the stars and planets and even the Sun revolve around Earth, a vision overturned by Copernicus’s theory in 1543 that placed the Sun at the center of the solar system.All of this is true, but there is a deeper inadequacy that has to do with time.For Dante, as for most classical civilizations throughout the planet, the creation of the universe took place at one time in the past.As Dante makes his way down into the inferno and up into the realms of the planets, the only thing in the universe that changes in any significant way is the human being.Everything else is fixed.Everyone else fits into an order that has existed since the beginning.But modern science has discovered that everything in the universe is in movement, everything is evolving.That’s why we say that medieval Christendom, as well as the other classical civilizations, lived in a cosmos.We don’t live in a cosmos.We live in a cosmogenesis, a universe that is becoming, a universe that establishes its order in each era and then transcends that order to establish a new order.This is why Dante’s work, which is unsurpassable in the realm of poetry, misses the essential challenge of our time.Dante’s focus is the human individual and his journey to salvation.As important as that might be, it is only a part of what we are dealing with.In the new cosmic story, the hero is the Earth Community itself.And the hero is the individual human.We cannot speak of the spiritual development of a person while the planet as a whole is withering away.Either the person and the community blossom forth into their full destinies together, or they both collapse into a degraded state beyond the worst horrors Dante was able to imagine.Which brings us to the point of similarity between Dante’s vision of things and your own.Both you and Dante consider the happenings on Earth to be of supreme value.Dante’s way of expressing this is geometrical.He conceives the universe as revolving around Earth.It is on Earth that the most significant activity takes place, which for Dante is the spiritual development of humans.That humanity is of central importance in the universe is understood by Dante’s angels.Even one act of love on the part of a single human results in a chorus of praise by the entire community of saints and angels in Dante’s heaven.In our conversations, I have come to see how you too accord Earth a supreme value, which you express not via geometry but creativity.Throughout fourteen billion years, the ultimate power in the universe has constructed so many things, but nothing more complex than the Earth Community.As you say, there may be other living planets, but in the known universe, in the universe about which we have empirical evidence, Earth is more alive, more intelligent, more beautiful, more sensitive, more complex than any galaxy or star or planet we have examined.Earth then can be considered the primary revelation of what the universe is aiming to accomplish.I would say that your difference with Dante is that you recognize every particular as having dual dimensions, the individual level and the universe level.From the perspective of the individual, we see a particular hawk flying above us.Gawking would be a better description.He had devoted a lifetime to the study of the world’s wisdom traditions that surrounded us here in the library, but his search had spilled out in every direction.Upstairs were a thousand volumes exploring the wisdom of women’s and indigenous traditions.What was once a second pantry now housed his biology and scientific cosmology volumes.On the third floor were the shelves housing history texts.It was his lifelong reflection on the history of philosophy and religion that had led him to his insight concerning the significance of a new cosmic story arising from four hundred years of scientific study of matter.He realized that something foundational was taking place as this new story took hold of the human imagination.Let me be honest, I said.It’s there implicitly in your thinking, just below your conscious mind.But like the rest of modern society, you struggle to keep the universe dimension in mind.In our drive to analyze entities into their component parts, we push that aside.That is why our default mental state is to see a universe filled with objects that we have catalogued by the millions, an achievement we must not underestimate.But this analytical work comes with a cost.This deformation of consciousness is not identified in any psychiatric manuals because the writers of such manuals are themselves victims of it.Thomas lifted his finger as if remembering something.These three tiny volumes were his personal copy of Dante’s poem, which he carried with him wherever he went.They looked like moleskins that had been purchased half a century ago.The worst of the three had additional wear.Either Thomas had read that volume the most, or it had suffered a cycle or two in a washing machine.I read Dante backward. He scratched the hair behind his ear with a nervous twitch of his fingers.I was nearly catatonic over the state of things, both at the human and planetary levels.The spiritual journey is difficult because the first step is recognizing the ways one’s character is out of sync with reality.For Dante, to be out of sync is the pathological state of desiring that which degrades us.That on some basic level I was creating misery in the world without being aware of it.I stayed with Paradiso until I felt I had built up the necessary strength for the spiritual journey.The most terrifying moment in Inferno is Dante’s encounter with Medusa, a Gorgon whose hair is composed of venomous snakes.In classical literature, one glance from Medusa was enough to turn one into stone.