Dante and the Holy Culmination of the Roman Tradition (3)

It is not easy to express this succession and fusion that must not be considered historically but on a plane where the symbolic values remain such even if unknown or misunderstood until a new light suddenly illuminates them and reveals them. For the two traditions which we discussing, Rome is this light and the Comedy is the poem of sovereign and Holy Rome, the unifier, while Fascism is the operator of the synthesis in which the two forms are compounded in a new revelation of power. The greatness of Dante consists in the statement of these two aspects, the ancient and the new form, of the same tradition that is Roman universality, and, while in De Monarchia he combats, as he says, pro salute veritatis [“I engage in battle in this book for the cause of truth”] to reclaim the ancient tradition that had to remain to sustain the second. In the Comedy he arrives at the realization of the unification, at what we will have to call traditional perpetuity, showing the reality of a transhumanization [passage from a human state to a superhuman state] in all its levels that embrace beings and elements, world and afterworld [soprammondo], heaven and earth, from Forms to the Rhythms in the Silence.

He is therefore the advocate of Sacred Science in the living, and not theoretical, wholeness of the Roman Tradition, of the Imperium and the Regnum: the ancient and new traditions mutually sustain each other, avoiding thereby all incongruity of a conflict that would impoverish them, impeding their supreme synthesis which is, practically, the equilibirum of the temporal and the spiritual and, at the centre of realization, the complete transfigurative process, the integral initiation, the real ascent from the earth to the elementary and trans-elementary heaven.

All the symbols of the ancient tradition live again in the creative light of the achievement, the union with god [indiamento], and the Argonautic enterprise finds its fulfillment in the revelation of the true face of God with which the last canto and the last canto of the “Sacred Poem” end. The vein of gold, the vestment of glory, is dressed by Dante in the great light of Rome, highest peak in the radiant circularity of the Ineffable. All the traditional sciences flow together in the Comedy through a dynamic complexity of states and a perfect knowledge of the transitions in the ambit of the three worlds through which the process of the cosmic-human illusion takes place, up to its resolution in the supreme principle in the three phases corresponding to the death, resurrection and transfiguration of man in God. The process of death is slow, gradual, and it embraces all terrestrial experience in its most interior forms to which the vices correspond in the moral sphere, i.e., animality: from here, the descending hierarchy of the underworld where the realizing interiority assumes over itself all human development reducing it to a totalizing unity of life integrated in the being that had and lost the light, Lucifer. He represents the maximum concretion in the scheme of diabolic unity, the inverse reflection of the divine unity of which he has only the Trinitarian analogy in the three faces that are turned antithetically while in God they are homocentric and confluent.

Human plurality is resolved in its huge body, congealing itself, solidifying itself, petrifying itself: he represents the fall, the precipitation, the last terrestrial coagulation of the impassable waters, the freeze, the totalization of ignorance and darkness: its night corresponds, according to the reverse analogy, to the night of God, to the precreative indistinction in which all the determinations of being are based, as in him all the determinations of non-being, i.e., of evil. The analogy is perfect even in that Lucifer is the first and the last as God is the alpha and omega, but while in the first case, one has a duality of movement represented by the fall, in the second instead we have the essential unity of the opposites considered as the two confluent points of the divine cycle. Lucifer who was the first is the now the last: in him the temporal cycle is resolved in the eternity of evil, as in God the eternity of good is resolved. The two main antitheses represent what can be called the highest critical polarity, i.e., the terrifying point of active realization, that precisely in which Virgil very painfully creates the overthrowing which is a rectification where the descendant interiority becomes the ascendant interiority and the place of damnation, the basis of salvation. From the stony precipitation whose symbol is Lucifer the ascendant rectification begins and the stone that is concretion and fall becomes the basis necessary for the flight toward the elementary complexity and the trans-elementary totality.

Purgatory is the place of the second birth from Forms to Rhythms in a hierarchical purification of which the seven terraces [of the mountain of Purgatory] are pointers: it is not a passage from Forms to Rhythms but a resolution of Forms in Rhythms, of the body in the shadow, of corporeity in psychicity where then even this is freed in the spirituality that is the Silence, Paradise. Virgil’s “art” is the perfect knowledge of the two spheres, the Forms and the Rhythms, through which the decoupling from error and from the ignorance of human and terrestrial fallacy is accomplished hierarchically, since reality is one, that of God, but a man has knowledge of this reality only when he integrates it, realizes it, becomes it. Up to what is not completed, it is necessary to traverse the levels of development that, from the human point of view, are the three corresponding to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Dante in the Comedy proposes and exposes all the experience of realization, the complete, integral initiation, through positive knowledge, lived in all the levels that lead from the human to the divine. In the two first kingdoms, the ancient tradition sufficed to lead this path to completion and Virgil represents the science and the knowledge of the laws that govern the subterrestrial and sublunar world. He disappears before Beatrice because he dissolves in her, is completed in her, not because he opposes her as would be the case if Dante had considered the two traditions irremediably different and antagonistic as everyone believes, as much by those who exalt the first as by those who oppose the second. Beatrice appears at the moment when the first guide, Virgil, has completed his work and embraces the gross and subtle manifestations, the Forms and Rhythms. The exercise of human reason in its complete and normal development naturally leads to the sphere where a process of mystical union with God [indiamento] is initiated in the levels of the non-formal, i.e., in the zone of the Silence represented symbolically by the heavens.

Here Sacred Science, Beatrice, carries out the integrative cycles of unity in a flight that is light and salient flame between the Rhythms circularly untying itself in the plenitude of the Divine Being. The Trinitarian scheme is amplified in the assumption of the nine hierarchies, effulgent wings that facet the divine infinity of the joyful love of the Angels, Archangels, Principalities, Powers, Virtues, Dominations, Thrones, Cherubim, Seraphim, where celestiality is engraved in relations of light and splendour in the face of the terrestriality which is overcome, resolved, and dissolved in the divine whirlpool. There still remains, in the first seven heavens, the divisibility of the light with planetary vertices in a progressive self-realization of perfection in unity, a display of radiations in the body of the divine diamond.

In the residence of the sun where the zodiacal band combines with its perfection of the ternary and quaternary resolved in the supreme syntheses of the trinity (12 = 1 + 2 = 3), the mystery of the Perfect Man, the Triumphant Christ emerges, the perfection of the divine sonship in absolute assumption of radiance. It comes after the last creative level of the ninth heaven of the Trinitarian perfection, assuming in each of the Divine Persons the seal of the others so to project the mystery of the Ineffable in the creative circularity, then finally the absolute level, the culmination perpetuating itself in the eternal scheme of the worlds, the Empyrean. Here Beatrice disappears, not like Virgil, to permit a progress, an arriving, an end, but to unravel the mystery of the Last Seal where the virginal matrix carries out the cyclic reduction of the light in the very face of God. The last level of Silence is integrated in the same riverbed of the Divine Night where the pulse of the Ineffable vibrates in the realizing unity of God, the Supreme Zero, transcendence of the plenitude itself, darkness of the Ineffable.


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2 thoughts on “Dante and the Holy Culmination of the Roman Tradition (3)

  1. We see in this segment that de Giorgio is confirming Guenon’s teaching on symbols. He write: “symbolic values remain such even if unknown or misunderstood until a new light suddenly illuminates them and reveals them.” The symbol is there, even if its full meaning is hidden, or occult. Dante reveals in the Comedy the meaning of the occult name of Rome.

    He prepared the way in De Monarchia in which he revealed the full meaning of and justification for the first Rome. The way from a human state to a transhuman state is revealed in the Comedy. This is understood by very few today, and I suspect this is the first exposure of this occult teaching to most if not all Goranhoor readers.

    Those who cannot move beyond the first Rome of the Imperium are unable to progress. Those who don’t understand the second Rome of the Kingdom have lost touch with their own Tradition. Clearly we mean here a living connection, as de Giorgio writes, not merely a theoretical understanding.

    “Indiamento” is the word used in neo-Platonism for the mystical union with God. Once again, de Giorgio is making clear this connection, at least for those who make the effort to see and are not blinded by their pre-existing prejudices.

    The nine hierarchies, which we have described in Spiritual Beings can be understood as semi-divine beings or as higher, transhuman states. A fascinating metaphor used by de Giorgio refers to them as “facets”. In other words, the “Trinitarian scheme” is passed through, as it were, the facets of a diamond, and like a prism, separate the divine Light into the multiplicity of the world. Hence, the angelic hierarchies assist in the creation (or emanation) of the world.

    It is worth meditating on the idea of the Perfect Man, that is, the man who realizes all his possibilities as both Guenon and Evola have written about. The end of such a meditation will be the realization of the Absolute Being; but the way to such a realization is only through the Perfect Man.

  2. Pingback: Gornahoor | Dante and the Holy Culmination of the Roman Tradition (4)

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