Pilgrimage and Place

 Can you know the place where you are from without viewing it from the outside? 

Dante is in exile. He sets up his poem as a story of pilgrimage. It is a universal story. Pilgrimage is an analogy for life. In a way we are on a pilgrimage because we have been removed from some perfect version of love and relationship with our creator and are wandering among the created world distracted by events that seem urgent and important but are neither in the grand scheme of things.

It is one of the accepted interpretations of Dante's opening Canto that the wood that he is lost in is reflecting the wood of the suicides that we later encounter in Inferno canto XIII. Dante is lost in a wood that makes it harder to see how to ascend the mountain. He is blocked by animals that make it impossible to proceed but by taking a circuitous route. Dante's exile in reality is neatly illustrated by the self-doubt and dark confusion of this analogy. There is something universal in this frustration. Virgil is for Dante what Dante is for others in thinking around the obstacles to seeing this life more clearly for what it is. 

Dante's poem is a deeply Christian one. It emphasizes the relationships that each of us have. Dante's emphasis on his own literary influences, his own unique history, his location of Florence, and even his own childhood infatuation provides a rooted perspective that is so honest that it feels almost universal. We are sitting here today 700 years after the writing of this poem learning about Florentine history and his contemporary poets because his writing is so compelling as to help us see ourselves in his descriptions of his peers and the icons of power, politics, and spirituality that he provides. It is a remarkable feat to combine the particular with the transcendent in this way. 

Perhaps Dante's great skill comes from the very painful experience of exile. Perhaps he understands the analogy of pilgrimage better than any of us due to the fact that he is involuntarily participating in the pilgrimage. For those of us that travel, we go on sojourns with the knowledge that we will return to our home, our bed, and our family at the end of the experience. If you removed this aspect of the trip, how many of us would be content to enjoy every moment of the travel experience we are on. 

For pilgrims on dedicated spiritual journeys, too, this knowledge that the trip will end and you will return home prevents us in a way of fully immersing ourselves in the pilgrimage. The night in a bunk bed becomes something temporary to be endured so that we can say we have done it. There is a finiteness to the experience that defies the sense of the pilgrimage. A retreat is temporary and therefore unusual. 

Dante longs for Florence in ways that few of us really long for anything. He not only wants to be back in the position to participate in his community, but he has a strong sense that he could help shape it in a way that would bring much needed order to the republic. By being denied his heart's desire here, he is in touch with a special kind of agony that is almost Christ-like in its will for the good of others that cannot really be expected to be perfected. Dante's sacrifice is not enough to redeem the republic he obsesses over. 

This agony might be a way into understanding why Dante moves to a higher level of understanding. To have a longing for Beatrice, who died young. To have a longing for Florence, while in exile. Each of these contributes to the better understanding of a more ordered and proper longing. These flawed replacements are not wrong as much as they are incomplete. We long to have a relationship with God and we long to be in the kingdom of heaven. Beatrice and Florence pale in comparison to these perfect ideals, but the perfect ideals are hard to grasp in the abstract. 

It is the love of place and of person that gives us special insight into how disordered our initial impulses are. When we clarify these impulses we step outside of ourselves and see the purity of the motivations. It then is important to take that insight back into our partial experience and appreciate what we have in the particular. We have to apply this universal purity to the particular messiness in order to redeem it. 

When people are interrupted in this process, they see the universal by being deprived of it long enough to appreciate it, they rush back with this good intention. When someone loses a spouse, they see how much that person meant to them on a daily basis. If we are lucky enough to be reminded of our own fortune when we observe close friends going through tragedy we are given the opportunity to enter back into our joy with new eyes. It is a tragic irony that we must experience loss to see pure motivations, but Dante might be one of the best examples of taking this insight and elevating it to an art form.