Dante begins this canto in an extraordinary way. Look at this:

Should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem,

to which both Heaven and earth have set their hand

so that it has made me lean for many years,

 

should overcome the cruelty that locks me out

of the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb,

foe of the wolves at war with it,

 

with another voice then, with another fleece,

shall I return a poet and, at the font

where I was baptized, take the laurel crown,

 

For there I came into the faith

that recommends the soul to God, and now,

because of it, Peter encircled my brow.

The pathos in this moment is overwhelming. Remember, Dante has just been tested in his faith by St. Peter, and passed. Here, opening the canto devoted to the virtue of Hope, the exiled poet expresses hope that his art — that is, the poem that he forged in the pains of exile, of homelessness, of having his deepest identity stripped from him — will be the means of his redemption. He identifies himself with the lost sheep of the Gospel parable that the Good Shepherd will risk anything to save. He identifies a return to Florence, to the baptistry where he entered the Kingdom as a baby, as the place where he will be honored as a poet. I don’t read this as Dante’s hope for a literal return to Florence, but rather his poetic way of expressing hope for the reconciliation his art will have brought him to the Heaven. It’s not that God will reward Dante with heaven for having written a beautiful poem; that’s not how Christian theology works. It’s that Dante worked out his salvation through the writing of this poem, because it took him through repentance and into deeper unity with the God he had forsaken years ago.

Note well that Dante’s use of the “fleece” imagery identifies him with St. John the Baptist, the prophet of Christ, who lived in exile in the wilderness, preparing the way of the Lord. St. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence, and its baptistery — the place where Dante was baptized — is dedicated to him. In these tercets, Dante identifies himself profoundly with his city, the one that has sent him into the wilderness. It strikes me that Dante is indicating here that he knows he will only be reunited with Florence in the Heavenly Jerusalem, where perfect justice is done, and all broken things are made whole. These tercets form the bridge between Faith and Hope, which is the topic of Canto XXV.

A few words before we go further into hope. These past two weeks, I’ve been reading a fair amount about the work of the black critic Albert Murray and the black playwright August Wilson. Both men believed that African Americans are “blues people,” meaning that the essence of their existence as a people is in the blues. They have suffered as forced exiles from their native continent, from their own families (which were broken up by slavery), and from themselves, thrown as they are into a country where their personhood and worth has been historically denied by the broader white culture. Yet their staggering resilience in the face of the worst life can inflict on a people has produced sublime art, and this art is not merely an aesthetic accomplishment, but it both contains the spirit of the people from which it came, it tells their story, and it contains within it the means of their sustenance and points to their redemption. August Wilson once wrote:

That my ancestors had arrived in America in chains as part of a labor system. They were forced to work on the vast agricultural plantations in the South. They made do without surnames and lived in dirt floor cabins. When they tried to escape, they were hunted down by dogs and men on horseback. They were denied the benefit of familial tutoring. They had lost their political will and with that the right to define their own person and their own destiny. They had lost the power to construct their own political history. They lost their moral personality and their language. They lived in a world that refused to recognize their gods, their manners, their mores. It despised their ethos and refused to recognize even their humanity.

Undaunted, and within the scope of the larger world that lay beyond their doorstep, they had begun to build a culture, to set down rules, and to urge a manner of being that corresponded to their temperament and sensibilities. Life was to be lived in all its timbre and horrifics, with zest and purpose. To live hard is still to live, and it was this life, worthy of the highest of possibilities, that was to be cultivated and celebrated. And it was this culture that I learned in Pittsburgh in my mother’s house.

The culture that was passed on to him was a blues culture (meaning not just a musical culture, but a culture marked by a blues sensibility; the blues was the core form the spirit of that culture took). As Albert Murray wrote in his landmark study Stomping The Blues, the blues exist to reaffirm life and make its continuity possible in the face of adversity. The blues exorcise the thing they represent by transforming them (transfiguring them?) into an affirmation of life, its dignity, and of defiance of all that denies life. In the final scene of Wilson’s play The Piano Lesson, the evil spirit of slavery and its legacy, including its legacy to divide families generations after slavery’s end, is finally cast out by the blues played on the totemic piano during an exorcism. In particular, the evil spirit of slavery possesses Boy Willie, who is obsessed with proving his worth to the white man, giving his oppressor more power than he deserves. Art becomes the means through which suffering is expressed, robbed of its power to destroy, and in fact turned into the source of life.

Dante Alighieri is a blues man. Like Herald Loomis in Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, he finds his song; the Commedia is that song. In it, Dante returns to his ancestral religion, Catholicism, for his spiritual renewal, despite the fact that the priesthood is corrupt and the Pope is his persecutor. He refuses to give his oppressors power over him that they don’t deserve. He turns to his ancestor Cacciaguida for inspiration. And he does an astonishing thing in Western literature: by creating high art out of the lives of the people he lived with in medieval Tuscany, Dante revolutionized Western literature, and opened the gate to literary modernity.

Compare this to August Wilson, who called his discovery, at age 20, of Bessie Smith’s blues a creative watershed. The blues, he realized, was what came about when African Americans were carried into exile, and had everything taken from them but their spirit. What they made from that experience was the blues. He said he dedicated his own drama after that to exploring universal themes in the experiences of ordinary black Americans. He told an interviewer in 1996: “So I say, ‘Let’s look at it. The world is right here in this back yard.’ There is no idea that cannot be contained by black life. We have the entire world here.”

As Dante had the entire world in Tuscany of his day. The Commedia is Dante’s blues. And I’ll tell you what re-reading the opening tercets of this canto reduced me to tears this morning. I was up till four a.m. last night reading August Wilson, and thinking about how art and religion have carried African Americans through suffering and exile, and today I come to this intensely personal statement of Dante’s faith and hope, made as he was surely coming to terms with the likelihood that he would never make it back home, in which he binds the art created out of his suffering to his baptism, to the new, redeemed life he created by the grace of God out of the death of his old. Dante sees this poem as his spiritual rebirth, as his return from exile, as completing the circle, as his homecoming and his second baptism.

Giuseppe Mazzotta writes that Dante, in these tercets, presents his own writing as “an ascetic labor of the soul.” Through the composition of his great poem, Dante has stripped himself even more bare, so that the Holy Spirit could work through him. Mazzotta says the image of his own restoration at the Baptistery in Florence implies reunion of the community whose bonds have been sundered by civil war. Prof. Mazzotta:

Why would he use this particular metaphor? The baptism is the time when a community is constituted, and the baptismal font is clearly a space that has that same value. It also has a textual and historical element related to the sacrament that takes place there, which is a ceremony that reenacts Exodus. When a child is baptized, he is told that he is re-creating the crossing of the Red Sea in Exodus.

So Dante is asking: how does  poet come home? The answer, initially, is one of hope, hope for a homecoming where everybody will be at peace. There will be a feast and a festive mood. It is his great fantasy of the winner’s return. Yet he’s also using this language of a baptismal font, as if he were saying that the poet could only come home in order to tell his community that he has to get out again. He has been punished, and exile itself is the only message that his poetry can convey to the community from which he has been exiled. He is convoking the whole community around the baptismal font to tell them that this is where they belong — in exile, or at least in the language of spiritual exile, a language that implies a kind of remaking and rethinking of oneself.

What got to me emotionally today was the sudden realization that my own personal pain of exile, of not being able to fully return Home, for reasons having nothing to do with geography, and for reasons completely outside of my control, had forced me to do some excruciatingly difficult spiritual work of remaking and rethinking myself, and the sources of my identity. I had stumbled into my own dark wood by defining myself too strongly by the idols of Home and Family — by loving those goods in the wrong way, and without meaning to, giving those who were the embodiments of Home and Family, and who would not receive me, more power over me than they were entitled to. Having to come to terms with the fullness of my own symbolic exile had made me physically ill, emotionally broken, and spiritually desolate. But it also was, and is, generating in me a creative sense and power that I have never before known. I’m still working this out, but here’s the thing: Dante is helping me find my own song.

So. Canto XXV. The Canto of Hope. Beatrice introduces Dante to St. James, and tells him that Dante is the most hopeful man on earth. God has given him the opportunity “to come from Egypt to Jerusalem that he may see the city before his time of warfare has its end.” In Biblical symbolism, she is saying that Dante the pilgrim has been granted an extraordinary grace to see the Promised Land, the Heavenly Jerusalem, the Home that all Christians hope for once they are delivered from the slavery of the passions. Now St. James asks Dante to tell him how he understands hope.

“Hope,” he says, “is the certain expectation of future glory, springing from heavenly grace and merit we have won.”

I could be wrong, but I don’t think Dante means that we can earn our way to heaven. That would nullify so much of what has come before. What he’s saying is that “merit” is only our cooperation with heavenly grace — that is, the degree to which we have consented to get out of the way, overcoming through prayer, fasting, and good works our own selfishness, and thereby letting the grace of God regenerate our deadened spirits from within.

The pilgrim tells St. James that his hope tells him to keep moving towards Home:

“Isaiah says that each in his own land

shall be vested in a double garment,

and their own land is this sweet life.”

He’s talking about Isaiah, Chapter 61, which offers a vision of the Messianic age, in which all that is broken is restored. Says the prophet:

Instead of your shame you will receive a double portion, and instead of disgrace, you will rejoice in your inheritance. And so you will inherit a double portion in your land, and everlasting joy will be yours.

The hope, then, is that for those who mourn, those who have been exiled, those who have been shamed and dispossessed and crushed by injustice — that they will be rewarded doubly for their fidelity to the Lord. Dante is saying here that his hope consists in his confidence that suffering, exile, and death are not the last word, that in the age to come, all will be restored for those who kept the faith. Note well that hope is not the optimism that all will be made right in this life. Hope is the assurance that even if things are not fully made right in this life — even Dante does not know whether or not that will happen to him before he dies — but rather that our suffering here has meaning. God has not forgotten His people, and will be rewarded by Him in eternity.

When Dante completes his answer, the circles of the blessed proclaim their approval by singing Psalm 9, which is an affirmation of hope in the Lord, Who will ultimately deliver justice.

The great African American gospel singer Mahalia Jackson said she preferred gospel music to the blues, because the blues are a music of despair, while gospel is the music of hope. I think, however, that blues and gospel are brother and sister, and their family bonds cannot be severed. Theirs is a dialectical relationship; they feed off each other. For Dante, the blues and gospel, so to speak, are intimately connected. His Inferno is the blues, speaking only of sin, despair, and brokenness; his Paradiso is gospel, speaking only of holiness. His Purgatorio is where they both are joined. Maybe it is not quite right to call him a bluesman. He is that, but he is also a gospel singer, is he not?

We can’t know the fullness of hope unless we have truly known the depths of despair. No suffering, no crown. This is the lesson that is passed down in every generation. In this canto, Dante tells St. James that his hope began with King David, “that exalted singer of our exalted Lord,” whose Psalms sing of desolation, redemption, and exaltation, as David had known all three. The Psalms are the blues of the Hebrews, but also the gospel, the proclamation of the Good News. The Psalms teach us that blues and gospel are only superficially polar opposites.

King David’s hope was taken up and handed down through St. James’s epistle, which is a counsel of hope amid adversity. From the Letter of James:

Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials,for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And let perseverance be perfect, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.But if any of you lacks wisdom,he should ask God who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and he will be given it.But he should ask in faith, not doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed about by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord, since he is a man of two minds, unstable in all his ways.

The brother in lowly circumstances should take pride in his high standing, and the rich one in his lowliness, for he will pass away “like the flower of the field.” For the sun comes up with its scorching heat and dries up the grass, its flower droops, and the beauty of its appearance vanishes. So will the rich person fade away in the midst of his pursuits.

Blessed is the man who perseveres in temptation,for when he has been proved he will receive the crown of life that he promised to those who love him.

Says Dante, of the effect King David and St. James had on him through their writing:

“After [David] had imbued me with his song,
you poured your epistle down on me so that I,
overflowing, now rain your rain on others.”

What powerful imagery! The water of life, flows from one songwriter, who sang the blues and who sang the gospel, to another writer, and now, through the centuries, to Dante, who draws on the tradition, reifies it — that is, makes it real for him, in his historical circumstances — and passes it along, in his own redemption song, to others. Water flows into water, across time and civilizations. Though it falls into different cups, it is the same water of life that redeems us all.

In less than six weeks, I will stand inside the Baptistery in Florence, and I will read the opening verses of this canto there, in honor of the bluesman and gospel singer of Tuscany, and in gratitude to God for sending him to speak to my lostness in exile, and to proclaim hope to me, captive to my own error, and lead me out of the dark wood, and maybe, in time, to find my own song.

UPDATE: I realized after posting this that I may have misled you into thinking that Dante is only talking about artists and writers finding their own song. He’s talking about all of us doing so. Dante never would have chosen exile, but he came to see that it was only in exile that he found the song he was supposed to sing. Likewise for us. You, wherever you are, are suffering in some way. Things are not right with you and yours. What is the song you are singing in response? Have you found it yet?

Remember the lesson of Purgatorio XVI: we do not have full control over the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but we do have control over how we respond to them. None of us will escape trial. None of us. Our trials may be collective, or they may be individual. Some will be severe, others, not so severe. In the way we meet these trials, we will find our song. Or fail to. If you don’t look, you won’t find.

I think about my sister Ruthie, and her response to cancer. She found her song. She never, ever would have chosen cancer, but the sweet, soulful melody she drew out of her pain and her dying bore witness to the goodness of life and the power of faith. In her song we can all find the strength to go on. I recorded her blues and her gospel in The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming. Whether there is anyone there to transcribe your verses, very day you are writing the song of your own life. Find the harmonies, and sing them true.