Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life ...

Notes on the Divine Comedy

“Midway upon the journey of our life … ”

I had attempted to write my thoughts as I made my way through the Comedy of Dante Alighieri a year or two ago. My eyes being consistently larger than my stomach with regards to accomplishing writing goals, that project was put on the backburner, and I focused on Meditations on the Tarot. That too has been slow-going, but I plan to forge ahead.

However, the Comedy isn’t something that sits without impatience on a dusty corner of a bookshelf and I often find myself wanting to get back into it. To satiate that hunger, I’ll start with the small amount of notes I have written and attempt to articulate them into a few readable Substack posts.

I am using the Longfellow translation of the Comedy because it begins with the word ‘Midway’, which I believe speaks of the central theme (pun absolutely intended) of the epic poem.

Often, especially true in the modern world ensnared as it is by the reign of quantity, we hear the words, ‘middle ground’, ‘middle path’, ‘middle way’ etc. or the concept of a centrism associated with a mere aggregation of the total data to find a place that avoids the polar extremes. It’s a place of comfortability, really. Lukewarmness. We needn’t be reminded, hopefully, of the words of Christ in St. John’s Apocalypse regarding what awaits those who seek the safety and comfortability of the lukewarm.

Such is it then that this “middle” is not the middle of Christ, neither is it Dante’s ‘midway’.

Dante’s ‘midway’ is the centre, fulcrum point upon which all of reality finds its orbit. In Canto 28 of Paradiso, we read of this ‘Punta’:

16 A point beheld I, that was raying out
17 Light so acute, the sight which it enkindles
18 Must close perforce before such great acuteness.

…

40 My Lady, who in my anxiety
41 Beheld me much perplexed, said: “From that point
42 Dependent is the heaven and nature all.

Now, clearly in the context of the complete opening line, Dante is situating the beginning of his journey into the depths of Inferno, back up through Purgatorio and ultimately to the very centre of all reality in Paradiso, at the middle point in the chronological timespan of his life. Commentaries will say that it was a 35-year-old Dante, referencing his own middle-age when he experienced his revelation, due to Psalms 90:10 which states that the typical human lifespan is 70. It is around this age that we find it common for people to have an existential crisis of meaning. They have put off their youth and often find themselves wondering what life is about and whilst this topic, in and of itself, is not at all unrelated it is, again, not the direction we are taking.

Dante speaks here of a metaphysics where the beginning is the end and the end the beginning and both are the aforementioned centre, axial or fulcrum point of all things. Let us view the opening line from the lens of the above-mentioned cantos, as well as the following, final lines of the Divine Comedy:

142 Here vigour failed the lofty fantasy:
143 But now was turning my desire and will,
144 Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

145 The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

Dante’s tells us what that ‘Punta’ is at the centre of all reality, Love. The love that moves the sun and other stars, as it indeed moves his own ‘desire and will’ as if a wheel.

Ultimately, whether Dante finds himself at the innermost circle in proximity to the celestial point of love, or he is at the beginning of his journey lost in a dark wood, he is being moved by love. And so, he is “midway” on the journey. Interestingly, the word ‘journey’ has its etymological origins in the Latin ‘diurnum,’ (though Dante, in the Florentine dialect, uses ‘cammin’ which suggests the usual concept of a journey) meaning only a day’s travel, or one revolution around the sun. This gives the fitting vision, again, of an axial point (the sun) with bodies moving around it, held in orbit.

Another idea that comes into play here regarding the middle is also that of the ‘in-between’ places and times. The times and places that hold the balance between polar extremes where it is thought that the veil between our world and the next becomes most thin. The first Canto, in fact, abounds with allusions to these in between times and places. Dante finds himself in a dark wood, the place of so many folk tales from throughout time that see the heroine caught up in otherworldly happenstance and the meeting of creatures of allusive origin, neither completely physical nor spiritual in aspect. The woods itself, on account of the trees filtering through the sunlight, can appear as a place of perpetual dusk (one of the considered in between times).

The dark wood is compared, by Dante, with death.

4 Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
5 What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
6 Which in the very thought renews the fear.

7 So bitter is it, death is little more;

Death is one of the primary in-between states, the medium between this life and the next and, in initiatory traditions, death as the severing of egoic attachments, the medium between mere life and the life transformed.

Dante recounts that he was in a state of slumber which is often used to describe a kind of twilight sleep between waking consciousness and deep sleep where hypnogogic and dream visions abound.

And perhaps my favourite reference, pregnant with so much meaning:

13 But after I had reached a mountain’s foot,
14 At that point where the valley terminated,
15 Which had with consternation pierced my heart,

At the foot of the blessed mountain at the point where the valley had terminated. Certainly, an in-between place. The valley kin to that of the valley of the shadow of death of the Psalmist. The mountain to that of the many sacred mountains of Holy Writ and the Ancient Wisdom Traditions worldwide, not least of all Calvary Hill.

And then, verse 15, Dante tells us that the valley, (which we have made that of the Valley of Death), has “with consternation pierced my heart.”

We find here reference to the ultimate of in-between times and places, namely the crucifixion of the Godman, Jesus Christ, the mediator, the summary of the in-between. In particular, the piercing of the side of Christ, the opening of his Sacred Heart.

This is the removing of the veil between heaven and earth for those willing to have their own hearts also pierced, even upon anxiety of death. It is here, in the middle, the centre of all things, that one must dwell if they are to plumb the depths, even unto the pit of inferno, and return. Likewise, to scale the heights of the mountain and beyond unto Paradiso and also return. To be Homo Pontifex. Human Bridgebuilder. Human medium. Little Christs.

This will lead us into a part 2. More on the ‘middle’ soon.