27 - Dante and Fortune Telling

As Dante reaches the depth of Hell he is less sympathetic to the damned, and he often writes slapstick comedy. He talks to the butts of the simoniac Popes, who are buried upside-down, and he has a devil salute his platoon with a trumpet sound coming from his “arse.”

But in Canto XX Dante cries, in pity for the diviners. He is scolded by Virgil, as usual, but we should not mistake Virgil for the higher conscience in Dante. Virgil, even as a venerable guide, is still a Pagan in Hell – he is not always right.

In fact, in this strange canto Virgil declares that what he wrote in the Aeneid on the origins of his city, Mantua, is plain wrong. This apparently is a device to distance Virgil from the accuse of divination. Virgil's book, according to Esolen, was used in the Middle Ages as a means to foresee the future, by opening it at random and reading a passage. 

This reminds me of the I-Ching, the Book of Changes used for divination in Chinese culture.

I used to read the Tarot cards (which are of Italian origin, and were condemned by the Pope) and I have consulted the I-Ching, even though I use them mostly for meditation and cultural interest; as a method of divination they often fail. 

 

I, like Dante, was horrified at the punishment for the diviners: they have their head turned backward, which is an indignity, and they can only see behind them. Why was their sin so terrible, and...wasn't Dante also predicting the future, when he places Boniface VIII, then alive, in Hell?

Well, as to predicting the future, Dante makes it clear in canto XX that he is writing a book, precisely a comedy, and precisely...canto XX (the pedantic attention to detail, like Virgil's long geography lesson, is a typical tool of comedy). 

Dante never declared anywhere that he is the voice of God. In Purgatory he invokes the Muses, not the Holy Spirit, to assist him (in Hell he does not invoke anyone). He does say in this canto that everything he writes is the truth. And in a way it is. The people he encounters, and the ethical questions they provoke, are real, in the same sense that Hamlet is real.

Dante even assures us in Canto I that he has gone through Hell for real, with his living body. But let's examine the implications of what he is saying. In Dante's times visionaries recounted their dreams of Hell, claiming they were inspired directly by God, and Medieval people believed them. But if someone insists he has been to Hell, and to the planets above, “in person,” would anyone believe him? Of course not. This is Dante's way of saying, again, that he is writing a great adventure where the readers are invited to suspend disbelief ...but it is still a story.

As to the gravity of the diviners' sin, Esolen thinks it has to do with fraud: the claim they could tell the future, which is not possible. I agree that predicting the future is not possible...I have plenty of disappointing evidence from my Tarot. But we should not overlook that in literature, and in the examples in Dante's Hell, the diviners are successful in predicting the future. 

Or, if their sin consists of “wanting” to know the future, which only God should know, why are the biblical prophets revered, and why does not Virgil rebuke the damned and Dante when they discuss the future?

Dante does not say why the diviners are singled out. He mostly makes fun of them. Even the venerable Tiresias is remembered not for his role in the Theban tragedies, but for meddling with snakes and getting punished.

If we are not given a clear-cut answer (and in a masterpiece we never are, unless it is on the geography of Mantua), we are free to propose an interpretation as long as it does not contradict the text. According to a modern current of criticism, “all reading is misreading” anyway. 

 

“Tragic irony” for the Greeks meant that in trying to avoid one's fate, the protagonists end up causing it to happen. If Oedipus had not been left to die by his royal parents to avoid the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother, Oedipus would have known who his father was, and would have taken precautions to avoid killing him. Instead, he leaves his alleged father to protect him from the prophecy, and during a petty skirmish along the road he kills his real father. 

 

In the same tradition is Shakespeare's Macbeth, who is told he will be defeated only when the forest will move. Confident of his victory, he murders his lord and takes his place, and alienates all his friends, suspecting them as traitors, until they rebel. They cut brushes from the forest and advance with them as shields. The forest is moving, and Macbeth is defeated. 

 Even Melville follows this tradition. Captain Ahab is told that he can be killed by Moby Dick only when he sees on the sea a hearse made of American wood. Ahab pushed his ship and crew to their destruction, only realizing at the end that his sinking ship is the hearse.

 

What these stories have in common is that decent people decided to cheat. They employed dirty means, treason, murder, usurpation, to reach the predicted fortunate outcome or to avoid a foretold unfavorable one.

Dante does not behave this way. When Brunetto Latini predicts to him good fortune because he is a good citizen and a good man, Dante responds, “I will do what is right, no matter how Fortuna turns.” 

We can't control all our events and circumstances. We can only follow our conscience. Buddhism has the same concept, warning us not to be swayed by the eight winds: prosperity and decline, fame and censure, and so on. One has to practice right speech, right thought, right action, right compassion, no matter what the circumstances are. Dante would have been a good Buddhist. 

 

People can do the right thing and end up in Hell. Farinata had stood up against his own allies, who wanted to raze Florence to the ground. After his death the Florentines declared him a heretic, and his corpse was exhumed and thrown on unconsecrated ground. That was the repayment for saving the city. And then God upholds the sentence and puts him in Hell. But there Farinata stands straight, because his conscience is clear. Who says that Dante's comedy does not have heroes?