Wed. Dec. 6- It may not seem fair but you gotta “live” with it.
19. Jessica: The value of honor and its place in the afterlife
18. Olivia: What impact do the Dead have on the Living?
20. Brad: Divine justice: punishments and rewards in the afterlife
21. Emily: Long Live Literature! How the Katabasis Expresses Literature’s Immortality
I am pleased to announce that there are 2 best paper awards for our student conference, “The Afterlife: A Dead End or a Road to Somewhere?” held Nov. 20-Dec. 6. The awards go to:
Midori, “‘The Muses Tread Not Silently’: The Tradition of Music in the Otherworldly“
Emily Vallowe, “Long Live Literature: How the Katabasis Expresses Literature’s Immortality” [look for a podcast in the very near future!]
The recipients of these awards were selected by a student committee of the conference.
Session 5: The Moral Map
1. Lesley: The Afterlife as Moral and Spiritual Guide
2. Monic: Rivers: The Unifying Element in the Afterlife
3. Bethany: Does the Punishment fit the crime?
4. W. : Mortal Morality: A roadmap for the hereafter
(I was having computer issues too)
After thinking about Lauren and Khadija’s dialogue about divine will, and Emily’s comment about free will, I eventually started thinking of predestination. Predestination with respect to Dante confused me because Dante seems to present both predestination and free will, which seem two conflicting concepts. How can choice exist if everything is predetermined? If choice didn’t exist then how could hell (a place full of people who essentially made bad choices)? Yet in Paradiso Dante mentions predestination several times (in canto XXXII with the blessed infants for example), not to mention prophecy (which is made possible through predestination), and clearly hell exists for Dante.
Dante himself (at least Dante the pilgrim) seems to struggle with some aspects of predestination. In canto XX Dante asks, after finding Trajan and Ripheus in heaven, “Can such things be?” (83). To which the eagle showing him these things responds, “I can see that, since you speak of them, you do believe these things but cannot see how they may be; and thus, though you believe them, they are hidden” (87-90). Dante seems to attribute his incomprehension to the fact that he is human and thus can never fully understand God. In fact, in the next canto, St. Peter Damian tells Dante that “even Heaven’s most enlightened soul, that Seraph with his eye most set on God, could not provide the why,“ (91) and describes this trespass towards understanding as a “reachless goal” (99).
In a later discussion, we talked about how, to man, time is linear, but gods/God can see not only all three dimensions, but also the fourth of time; they have complete knowledge of all things. (Time as a fourth dimension was also discussed during the conference.) From this perspective, what is free will to man becomes predestination to God. God, who is outside of time, can see all the choices man will make, and knows what will happen in the end. In canto XVII, Cacciaguida uses a beautiful metaphor to explain the way of things to Dante. He says (starting at line 36), “Contingency, while not extending past the book in which your world of matter has been writ, is yet in the Eternal Vision all depicted (but this does not imply necessity, just as a ship that sails downstream is not determined by the eye that watches it).”
When trying to connect the idea of predestination to the classical tradition, the first example I thought of was King Oedipus, who seemed predestined to commit his horrendous acts. In trying to escape a prophecy, Oedipus’ family eventually fulfills it. I also thought of people in families that were cursed. These people seem to meet bad ends because their families are predestined for unfortunate events. Agamemnon, for example, was of the house of Atreus. Odysseus says, upon hearing how Agamemnon was killed, “How terrible! Zeus from the very start, the thunder king has hated the race of Atreus with a vengeance”his trustiest weapon women’s twisted wiles.”
(I’m sorry this is really late, I was one of those having technical difficulties)
I found the presentation today on the shape of dreams to be very interesting. I especially found the difference between the types of figures the gods chose to express themselves intriguing. The presenters pointed out that the dreams in Homer and Vergil’s epics both involved speakers who took the form of people the dreamers knew. In Dante’s dreams, on the other hand, the figures who interact with the dreamers are figures known to Dante because of their ties to God. The Greeks and Romans believed the figures in their dreams because they were people whom they trusted in their waking lives. Then on the other side, Dante must have trusted the figures in his dreams to be helping him because they were related to God and therefore must be there to help him. The Greeks and Romans did not have the same liberty of knowing for certain that their gods would only send dreams to help them.
The discussion of appearance in dreams also made me think more about what compels people to take action. It was shown that the Greeks were encouraged to take action when the figure appeared just as beautiful as in life but sad because something had not been done, and the Romans were coerced to do something by the horrendous appearance of those who appear to them in their dreams. If you follow the idea that Dante’s katabatic experience is a dream, then you can also see how he believed people would be more likely to do the right thing if they were presented with a horrible image of what happened to those who did not. It is the horror of what will happen to him in inferno if he does not return to the path of God that helps push him in the correct direction.
I see that there’s a problem with logging into this blog, so temporarily you’ll need to manually direct yourself to http://www.umwcpr.org/afterlife/wp-login.php (i.e. click the link)
Here’s the third podcast from November 29, 2006.
Session: Exploring The New Home
1. Alicia, “Dante’s Comparative Language”
2. Sophie, “Describing the Indescribable: The Transcendent Otherworld of the Odyssey and of the Divine Comedy“
3. Midori, “‘The Muses Tread Not Silently’: The Tradition of Music in the Otherworldly”
4. Nicole, “Eternal Relativity: Space-Time and Prophecy in the Hereafter”
This is the second Podcast from November 27, 2006.
Session: Lingering Life
1. Kathleen, “Recipricol Ties Between the Dead and Society”
2. Katherine, “The Relationship between the Soul and the Dead Through the Social Function of Death and Dying”
3. Khadija, “The Final Closure and Greater Purpose of the Disposal of the Bodies in the Classical and Italian Traditions”
