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Dante's Divine Comedy: A Contemporary Reading
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19262 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
11,583 Words |
| Author
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Benjamin B. Alexander
Benjamin B. Alexander is visiting assistant professor of
English at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where
he will be teaching Dante in a National Endowment for the
Humanities course this summer. He lectures widely to civic,
church, and academic groups on theological and literary
topics. |
One of the great ironies of American freedom has to do with the increase of liberty, yet the gradual erosion of political literacy. Since 1945 most Americans have become so used to their freedom that its presence has become a routine and instinctive reality. American liberty is so taken for granted that the central issue in the celebration of our national holidays is not what they commemorate, but that they fall on Monday so that the three-day weekend can be observed.
This cultural attitude is a result of the blessings of freedom and the perpetuation of American innocence that is as old as Jefferson's beguiling advocacy in the Declaration of Independence of the "pursuit of happiness." Many Americans regard the blessings of freedom as a sanction for the perpetual private agenda of the isolated individual attempting to live out a residual, highly personal version of the Jeffersonian ideal.
The increasing failure to exercise vigilance in comprehending the workings of American liberty in various aspects of society is characteristic of the advanced stage of our open society, which has progressed to such a state that the very presence of freedom has deteriorated into political boredom, indifference, and irresponsibility. And many citizens unreflectively assume that the blessings of liberty require no sacrifices nor impose any obligations. Such attitudes are symptomatic of a larger deterioration of what Cicero called "ordered liberty." He witnessed its eclipse in ancient Rome and the American republic seems to be repeating the patterns of its political forebear.
But the American crisis in political literacy and a zeal for the virtues of citizenship originate in a larger incoherence. This is a dysfunction rooted in metaphysics, theology, and political philosophy. The contemporary American political drift in the clouds of incoherence stems, in large measure, from a loss of familiarity with the various disciplines that provide the language and conceptual range necessary for authority and order to be comprehended.
The erosion of philosophic inquiry has been abetted by a pervasive cynicism and distrust of public life. Certainly the Vietnam War instilled a suspicion as well as a revulsion for the capacities of the state and the media to poison the political community. Most Americans, for instance, do not associate politics with a vocational call to statesmanship. The understanding of politics as a vocation and a craft rooted in service to God are arcane concepts that may have meant something to medieval political thinkers such as Saint
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